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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."
Jeez... if only Americans would have done the same thing in response to this guys efforts in his administration to do the same thing.
Seriously, where has the outrage been in the US? Did not George Orwell warn us? The number of Constitutional rights we've lost under the current administration is truly stunning and if we do not stand up and resist, this sort of thing will continue to spread throughout the world as it has in the UK, Japan, the US and many other European countries.
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The problem is that a lot of this nonsense was supported on both sides to some extent, the patriot act for example was voted for by both sides with only a few [you can count them on one hand] voting against it. Which is an important point to be made, it isn't just the administration alone that has condoned this, after all these could not have been passed without democrat support to some extent especially now with the democrat majority. it's a severe problem with our government that extends far beyond bush.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Word on the street is that laws to do kind of the same thing are being run through the Finnish government, without much visibility or discussion, backed and sponsored by various multinational corporations.
I'm a bit confused where all this "never mentioned by the major media previously" is coming from. There's been several articles, editorials and other mentions in the newspaper since the law was introduced. It just seems that people didn't really care enough to notice until now.
If you tap peoples' phones for good reasons, pretty soon you'll be tapping them for bad ones.
What do you mean by "soon"? J. Edgar Hoover (FBI) and Nixon are known to have abused domestic spying capabilities for political and dogmatic reasons. John Lennon was spied on, for example, merely for political statements not too different from the lyrics of songs like "Imagine".
Table-ized A.I.
They would just say, "Hey Bill [in the U.S.]... did you get that? We have him clearly visible now. Oh, AES is it? You need help with the brute force? Sure thing."
Sweden reports to the U.S. and vice versa. This is fact. I don't think they'd cut you off transmitting. In any case they would make it easier for you in order to get you to talk more and contact the rest of your terrorist buddies in the good old Soviet.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
Graduated high school in '01.
brave new world was on the curriculum, but not examined nearly as thoroughly as king lear or the scarlet letter.
1984 was not on the curriculum.
any coincidence that my state was a heavy red state, and the republicans had control of congress for 3 years before I even entered high school?
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Conspiracy theory: certain agencies are bribing or otherwise pressurizing officials in many countries to introduce this kind of legislation, as it gives them indirect access to wanted information (most countries pass on sensitive information about their own citizens to the CIA etc. more liberally than they could use it in court themselves). If lobbyists can get ridiculous (anti-piracy) laws passed, why shouldn't "law enforcement" agencies? Corruption is the biggest problem in european politics, so it's a rather straightforward thing to do...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Actually, it is more like not enough people think the government is evil.
And with a few exceptions, they aren't. Thats why almost everyone railing against the government seems to come off as or is viewed by the public as a kook or some sort of nutbag.
It is a big deal, because without this law, we can take the current criminal wiretappers to court and make them stop.
Of course, I understand Philo Farnsworth (who invented electronic television in the 20s) thought the same thing. Also fun fact; television started to get popular after Farnsworth' patent ran out.
Chronologically late.
You're wrong (but it's a common mistake). Go read "The State and Revolution" by Lenin. Even Lenin, who arguably later fucked up and betrayed those ideals himself, did not believe this.
The typical reason why people fail to understand the theoretical basis here is because most people only hear the superficial terminology and never bother to learn what they mean. Marx, and later Lenin, talk about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which will exist under socialism, as the method of transitioning society to communism.
It is also perhaps one of the reasons why it's proven so easy to trick people into supporting these dictatorships, and a key reason why so many revolutions ("socialist" or otherwise) lead to oppression.
Fact of the matter is that even Lenin's works makes it clear that the proletariat of the dictatorship refers to the working classes oppressing the capitalists in the same way that the capitalists in a capitalist country oppresses the working classes, and hence a net increase in freedom (on the basis that the working classes make a larger part of the people. The whole point is to abolish the capitalist class, by taking away their privileges, and making them gradually become members of the working classes.
Since this would effectively turn them into members of the ruling class, and eventually make everyone members of the ruling class, the idea is that it would eventually lead to a classless society where the state then just "withers away" and disappears.
This is further underscored because Marx and Engels refers to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as a way of talking of capitalist countries when they wanted to put across the point that without economic power political rights alone does not put people on equal footing.
In fact, to quote Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat:
Thus, in capitalist society, we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority-the exploiters.This idea of "producing democracy for the people, for the majority" is much of the basis of the early introduction of the "soviets" after the overthrow of the Czar.
One of the big problems with Leninism, though, is that it also emphasizes a "revolutionary vanguard", and enforces extremely strict party discipline. Historically, most revolutionary movements regardless of their goal, tend to push for far more radical changes than the people as a whole wants - you're more likely to be prepared to take to arms if you have more reasons to be unhappy with the current regime after all.
And when you then have a very disciplined organization that has spent years or decades building themselves up under the idea of always being in danger (because they were), and that people really supports their end goals (because that's how they justify taking to arms against the current regime), you have organizations that are primed to see any resistance as proof of "counter revolution".
It's a recipe for disaster, and sufficient to pervert any ideology, no matter how much people believed or believe in it at the time of the revolution. You can see that in movements across the political spectrum - movements ranging from the far left to the far right have been seduced into using extreme violence because they "know they are right".
It's a tricky one, because sometimes overthrowing the existing regime clearly is the right choice, but the more protracted that fight is, the more chance of developing an organizational culture that has a strong "us vs. them" mentality that will extend past a victory, making it very easy for a new regime to turn to the same methods as the regime that was overthrown.
The sad truth is that the Americans who do realize what's happened and are just too apathetic to mount any kind of protest.
That's just not true. When Baby Bush decided to invade Iraq, tens of thousands protested in the streets of Chicago, shutting down traffic on State Street and Michigan Avenue for a time. Anyone working or living downtown in the Loop (which I did at that time) saw the protest and marvelled at its size--a sea of people stretching a dozen blocks or more filling our streets, peacefully protesting.
They got almost no mention in the news. A brief page 13 story that there had been small protests against the war in Chicago and other cities. Nary a mention on the evening news (local or national).
Why, when we have a free press that loves a big, dramatic story? Well, draw your own conclusions, or form your own conspiracy theories as you will. I don't know why. I only know it happened, as I witnessed it with my own eyes.
People do protest. The problem in America has become that most of these protests seem to go unreported or underreported. Since the whole point of protesting is to make your cause known and get media attention, the protest is thus emasculated and rendered impotent. And of course, the more impotent protests become, the less people are inclined to go out and do it.
Americans do care. In their millions. The problem is, short of armed violence, there seems little chance of making those concerns known to the wider country, much less world. And frankly, most of us don't have the stomach for armed violence, and with the Bush Interregnum coming to an end at last, most of us don't think it's necessary.
So, right or wrong, we've chosen to have our voices silenced rather than start an insurrection, and until you're willing to see your own streets burn because your media muzzles your protests, I don't think you have any place criticising us for choosing to not burn our streets.
Not that things can't get bad enough that that becomes necessary (and without a voice, the odds of that have certainly gone up), but I don't think they're anywhere near that bad yet.
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in Italy the government is trying to pass a law that forbids most (warranted) wiretapping, with the exception of a few mafia related crimes.
In the last few years many white collar crimes made the news after wiretaps transcriptions were leaked the the newspapers.
Since people in the government (or friends and families thereof) were involved they're trying to bypass this 'problem' by prohibiting wiretapping altogether.
Needless to say there was no street protest about this, only a few articles on blogs or newspapers.
Seems like it's most of the world that's asleep and will wake to a harsh reality.
Animal farm shows neatly, what happens when citizens trust government. The book is attack to communists, because they did just that - promised better times, delivered none of it, ruling people worked only in their own interests and nobody else had a clue before it was too late.
I see no problems applying this to "democratic" governments as well. After all, everyone agreed, that pigs are the ones to be trusted with ruling.
Well, Lenin was off to a good start, a lot of actions he took came right out of the Manifesto. It's just that he wasn't able to take it far enough or provide a mechanism against the anti-socialistic bureaucracy of Stalin before he died. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed illustrates this nicely. I personally think that most current states in the EU have a much more socialistic nature than the USSR under Stalin.
Ultimately Stalin's actions lead to the perversion of socialism into a state built upon corporatism/fascism. The Soviet Union and communism as a whole was the largest intellectual experiment of the 20th century, and it has shown that mankind simply isn't ready for the ideals in the Manifesto. On a small scale it might be workable, but the world-wide revolution as portrayed by Marx is simply too vulnerable to individual greed for power.
Time for some god-given capitalistic coffee.
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Even the prime minister has been very clear about that every alliance parliament member is supposed to vote along party lines.
It seems that several of these are very uncomfortable about the law, and one member of the Liberal party has stated that she will abstain from voting.
It takes only four members to vote for the opposition, but the pressure is so big that they probably will do as they're told.
Well, I like your intentions but that is a bit of a red herring.
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.
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.
When I talk to people about politics, it is funny. As pissed off as they get with Bush, you ask them how Gore or Kerry would have done and they admit to wanting bush instead. If you ask them about Obama or clinton, it get sort of iffy too. They don't seem to be interested in their pledges to get rid of the bush tax cuts which means they will be paying more once again in an economy that is soaking them dry. So for at least a few people, we could be sitting still on the road if some people are elected and moving one way or another if a different person if elected. However, the idea of hell and the road to it will be different to each and every one of them. That makes it a little of a clouded issue escaping the real truth to the matters.
...who supplied the British Security service with the names of friends and colleagues who he believed to be communist supporters, and whose book, Animal Farm, was translated into many languages and published around the world, at the expense of the US and British secret service, because it was believed that it would help disillusion potential supporters of the Soviet Block.
George Orwell was no radical, came from a posh privileged background, and tried to thwart those who were fighting the ruling classes. In the mean time, he made a good living convincing the prols to buy his books and waste their energy wittering on about them while his kith and kin carried on as usual.
The majority of people saw the NSA wiretaps as the government doing something, that's why it didn't hurt Bush's reelection.
More proof that majority rule can be a miserable failure... when the majority is un/misinformed and too comfortable to give a damn about anyone else and thus wrong. Those of us who care about our rights need to protect ourselves from them.
What?
David Davis's stand for 'civil liberties' would look a lot more convincing if he hadn't
- Voted in favour of extending detention without charge from 7 to 14 to 28 days based on basically the same arguements as 42 days. And he's *not* saying now that 28 days was a mistake.
- Voted against an equal age of consent
- Voted in favour of the original enabling legislation for ID cards (although he's aparently against them now)
- Voted in favour of the death penalty, which whatever you think of the principle, in practice means the state will regularly kill innocent people - maybe only a small number, but an innocent person being judicially killed has got to be about the worst state infringement of civil rights possible.
So as a libertarian myself, excuse me if I'm not impressed. I can easily see an alternate reality in which if he had been home secretary and was doing the 'tough on terror' bit, he would have found all sorts of good reasons why 42 or 56 or 90 days was just fine.
Labour and the Tories both *stink* on civil liberties in general. Under the right circumstances, they would both sacrifice just about any rights we have if they thought it would show up the other party or pander to the tabloids.
It is interesting to note that the Swedish people has had a long history of trusting the government and governmental bureaucracy, with some historian speculating that the trust has its roots in the kings of the old times actually generally supporting the majority of the population, since they'd otherwise be overthrown. Even in ancient medieval times kings were elected ("Mora stenar") and could be overthrown by the people if they were too unpopular. This is one thing that makes this story spectacular. It might be evidence of a government trust that has been steadily decreasing over the last decades.