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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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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.
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.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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.
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?