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

Where's the outrage in the rest of the free world?

[BWJones]

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.

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

[Cathoderoytube]

I'm getting sick and tired of people constantly referencing George Orwell whenever some government institutes a wire tapping law. There wasn't any bloody wire tapping in Animal Farm!

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.

2 facts

[castrox]

Here are two facts: 1) Google already said they will not place any servers in Sweden, in case the law goes through. 2) Sweden's prime minister in conjunction with the defense minister fairly recently (no exact estimate) signed a treaty with the United States of America with the express purpose of sharing information obtained with wiretapping. Sweden's and the U.S. systems will be "integrated" and experience shared.

Ergo: big business have already identified this threat and we've already established a nice contract with the U.S. Telia, the largest ISP in Sweden, moved mail servers to Finland because their Finnish customers were getting worried.

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

[Capsaicin]

Funny thing, I thought Animal Farm was about democracy failing due to an uneducated public.

Animal Farm is a fairly obvious allegory of the betrayal of the hopes of the Russian Revolution. (HINT: The pig 'Napoleon' is Stalin and the horse 'Snowball' is Trotsky). In Orwell's mind that was "democracy failing," but that is perhaps not how you meant the phrase.

Bear in mind that Orwell was a revolutionary socialist, who fought for the Trotskyist POUM in the Spanish Civil War (SCW) and that the POUM was crushed, not so much by the Falangists, as by the Stalin controlled Communist Party. Stalin during the SCW, was actively supressing all worker-led collectivisation of industry and reinstalling the middle-class owners in the (vain as it proved) hope of convincing France and Britain to join him in opposing Germany and Italy (who were involved in the SCW on the Franco/Falangist side).

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

[vidarh]

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

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.

Our Voices Have Been Muzzled

[FreeUser]

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.

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.