Wiretapping Law Sparks Rage In Sweden

castrox writes "This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA — Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order. Furthermore, by law, the sitting Government will be able to instruct the wiretapping agency on what to look for. It also nullifies anonymity for press tipsters and whistleblowers. Many agencies within Sweden have weighed in on this, with very hefty criticism, e.g. SÄPO (akin to FBI in the US), the Justice Department, ex-employees of FRA, and more. Nonetheless, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote 'yes' to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents. After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens, and street protests, the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources. The result will likely be huge street protests on Wednesday. People have been completely surprised since this law has not gotten any media uptake until very late in the game."

Comments

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Nefarious Wheel]

If you tap peoples' phones for good reasons, pretty soon you'll be tapping them for bad ones.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Aeternitas827]

The US has long been resigned to give up freedoms gradually to 'ensure their security', but the end result is nowhere near worth the cost. Free thought has slowly been taken from us as a direct result of our willingness to sacrifice for no apparent reason; the current administration has really done nothing to be forthcoming with what is really going on, and we're on the way to being screwed as a result.

And this bit of legislation, whether we here in the States realise it or not, has much broader implications than just the privacy of Swedes being impeded; as I understand the article, any communications that hit Sweden are subject to monitoring; and as the article doesn't cite whether or not this requires the Originator or Terminator of a given communication be physically present in Sweden, this could include US-based items that pass through a network element of some sort that IS Swedish. And there's nothing to say that there won't be information sharing with governments of other countries, including ours, to implicate our citizens of crimes (where there are none being planned, let alone committed) on the basis of nothing but the content of a phone call or email that happened to cross through or end in Sweden. And it is foreseeable that the United States, in order to circumvent what discord there is domestically, may use that fact to continue the abuses that are already occurring, and in a way that may not be open to much challenge. All in all, this shouldn't be an outrage just for Swedes, but for anyone who would prefer that not everything they do be subject to some form of monitoring that is declared legal by some manner of court in the world.

This is not an isolated incident

[Opportunist]

Anti-freedom laws are springing up left and right, and invariably they're pushed through in some cloak-and-dagger midnight sessions, often either completing the bare minimum of readings or even trying to get away with simply ignoring the necessary process. Pressure is being used to browbeat MPs of the ruling parties into submission (where necessary) while every trick in the book is being used to avoid informing the opposition (and population) earlier than absolutely necessary.

Makes you think. I mean, those people are supposedly being voted into office by the majority, supposedly working for their interests. Why the hush-hush-rush-rush? If you're doing what your voters wanted, why bother trying not to inform the press? After all, what you do must be in the interest of the majority, so why care about the outcry of some naysayers and professional paranoiacs?

You're doing what your voters want, right? Right?

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[Phydeaux314]

*sigh* No, communism - the economic theory - has absolutely nothing to do with ultimate government control. In a communist system, there is no government. Perhaps you're thinking of socialism? Or Marxism-Leninism?

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[mOdQuArK!]

Actually, the final form of communism is about as far from centralized government control you can get. The big problem occurs because of Phase 2 when transitioning from a capitalist/fascist society to the utopian form of communism:

Phase 1) you supposedly have to instigate a revolution to get control of the society away from the rich fatcats,

Phase 2) there is a totalitarian phase where the revolutionaries assume absolute control in order to reconstruct all of the social & economic institutions to support the new communistic structures (while crushing any attempts by the fatcats to reestablish THEIR institutions), and

Phase 3) eventually everyone lives in little communes caring for each other (hence the name communism) and the political power is supposed to flow UP from those little communes.

I have forgotten just about all of the details, but this was the gist of what I remember reading (a long, long time ago) about Marxist Communism.

Needless to say, there hasn't been a major attempt at communism yet that made it past step #2. Somehow, the revolutionaries always seem to get stuck at that phase stamping out just one more discontented "enemy of the State" before they're quite ready to give up power.

The cynical might even suspect that, at least in some cases, the revolutionaries never actually intended to get past step #2, and instead were just using the "workers unite!" propaganda to build their revolutionary armies from the poor, desperate and gullible.

Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor

[wellingj]

You see, the majority of government, for the majority of people, is not going to hell. The majority of people saw the NSA wiretaps as the government doing something, that's why it didn't hurt Bush's reelection. They think the war in Iraq was proper although they might believe it was mismanaged or manipulated to start it. I personally think it was 8 years too late. Clinton should have went in back in 1995 and Al Qeada wouldn't have thought our reaction to 9/11 would be blowing up another asperin factory in the Sudan. But that's another story.

You see the problem is that the majority of people no longer believe in the Constitution or even know what it says. My idea of hell is a government that doesn't follow the law by which the populace gives it's consent to be governed. They are breaking law. When I break the law I get smacked with it. The government gets off the hook because no one within the government, and not even the citizens being ruled over, are calling their shit.

The problem is, the road to hell leads to different places for different people. Your hell might be another persons paradise or you thinking that we are almost there might be interpreted by someone else as sitting a the cross roads figuring out which way to go. In all, it (hell, or the idea of it) is an opinion that someone holds but this opinion can vary greatly. It is apparent that the majority of people think we either aren't on our road to hell, or we are driving the opposite direction and going away from it.

The problem is that my idea of hell is being coerced by force. The government employs this tactic to no end these days. What it comes down to is not an objective look at what hell is to me, or what hell is to you. The government is breaking the Objective law set out in the Constitution. Now the law has some subjective value, sure. But the fact that the government is breaking the law by which it has right to govern has little to do if people 'feel like' they are in hell or not. Those rules were put there to restrain government from ever causing people so much grief. What really gets my goat is that they have tools to change the law, but dare not do it because of the out rage it would cause, so they just passively skirt the issue and call it a "living document". Bullshit. You don't like what's in there, change it or follow it, or consider the right to govern revoked.