Sweden's Snoop Law Targets Russia

praps writes "There's been much controversy lately over Sweden's new law which allows the signal intelligence agency (FRA) to monitor all data traffic within the country's borders. The Swedish government has kept curiously quiet about the new law's objectives but sources close to the intelligence community say that Russia is the prime target. '"80 percent of Russia's contacts with large parts of the world travel through cables in Sweden. That is the core of the issue," said one source.'" Related: EuroConcerned writes "Many things are happening in Sweden after the new legislation on wiretapping has been voted. TorrentFreak has an article on what's going on, including massive protests and Google moving their servers away from the country."

Comments

now that's funny

[negRo_slim]

FTFA:

His email was leaked to the press by another party colleague and Andrén was later heard on a recorded phone-call exclaiming that his secrecy of correspondence had been broken and that it was âoeGestapo methodsâ. Dude, you just voted for a bill that allows all emails to be read and all phone calls to be recorded. Live with it!

I am glad to see their politicians are as inept as my politicians!

Re:now that's funny

[Opportunist]

I was thinking about the same. Personally, I'd want that person removed from his office. He voted quite obviously on a bill he neither read, understood, nor understood the implications thereof. How the fuck does he DARE to vote on it?

Seriously, if politicians had to survive in private business, they'd be fired on the spot.

Re:now that's funny

[init100]

He voted quite obviously on a bill he neither read, understood, nor understood the implications thereof.

He isn't the only one. Another one literally said I like signals intelligence, so although I really don't know anything about this bill, I'll vote Yes.

The stupidity is staggering.

Re:now that's funny

[ceoyoyo]

I used to think that phrase meant something. Then I realized how many completely incompetent people there are in private industry.

Re:now that's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

In a Swedish tv-program called Uppdrag Granskning (I believe -- may have been another program), a journalist walked around and asked politicians about the propositions they'd voted for.

I don't believe a single one of them actually knew what they were voting for.

Seriously, they don't read them. They don't care. I kind of doubt any other "democracy" works any differently.

It pisses me off to no end.

(No, I didn't vote for any of them).

Re:now that's funny

[Opportunist]

Sorry, but when I decide on something that is against the interests of my employer (remember, politicians are essentially our employees), and when asked why I decided that way my answer is "no idea, I don't have the foggiest about the thingamajig, but it sounded cool", what will my employer do?

Re:now that's funny

[Alinabi]

Since you've used the experience card, I shall too: I've lived in several Euro Countries, for years. I've followed debates in the national assembly of France in French, and of course Parliament in the UK. News in Dutch, and so on.

You are a real polyglot. Do you also speak Finnish? How about Hungarian?

Compare Harry Reid for example with another democrat, Lieberman.

Last time I checked Lieberman was an independent (one of only two in the Senate).

Maxine Waters is just one example of the 'out there' wing of the democratic party

Those are outliers. Every European parliament has its Ron Pauls and Maxine Waters too (Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alessandra Mussolini come to mind). That is not what I am talking about. When I think of ideology, I mean those core issues which a person or a party does not consider open for compromise. Here is an example: in 1999 the German Green Party was part of the governing coalition (with the Social-Democrats) at the time when Germany dispatched troops abroad for the first time since WWII, as part of the NATO deployment in Kosovo. This triggered a wave a mass resignations in the party, as nonviolence is one of the core issues of Green politics and many of its members did not see it as open for compromise. The party was also punished by its electorate in the next cycle of local elections

Now, you tell me which issues could trigger such cataclysmic events among Republicans or Democrats, and then we can discuss their differences, because everything else is just circumstantial.

solution to these sorts of problems

[suck_burners_rice]

My plan to fight this sort of thing:

1. Profit!!!

2. Buy a large island and form a new government on it, which cannot pass any laws without approval by 50% of the public (not 50% of voters but 50% of the island's population) in a vote, which takes place once per year.

3. ???

Re:solution to these sorts of problems

[Alzheimers]

That only works as long as you're greater than 50% of the population.

Re:solution to these sorts of problems

[mr_mischief]

I'm not sure how a discussion about how out of touch the politicians who pass laws like this have to be and how full-time professional politicians are bad for society gets modded off-topic, even if it is formatted as a typical joke.

The whole problem with a law like this is that people are getting paid to sit around full-time and think about how to have an impact on the lives of others. Many of the problems in the world are because politicians have too much impact on the daily lives of others. Obstructionism in government preserves the freedom of the people.

Re:solution to these sorts of problems

[koma77]

It was the _opposition_ that first proposed this law. Then after the election, a shift of government and: the same law gets passed. Nice.

Excellent

[dahitokiri]

It's good to know people aren't sitting back and are actually protesting this law in person. Americans could probably learn something from that... Google checking out of the country definitely packs a punch too, even if there isn't much of an economic impact.

Re:Excellent

[jeiler]

May not be much of an economic impact, but it's one hell of a PR impact.

Re:haha

[Anonymous Coward]

sweeden is full of loser-faggots

Only because we are so generous with immigration from Finland and Norway

It's NOT within Sweden's borders

[cycler]

There is one major fault in the article.

The FRA will only spy on traffic going across Sweden's borders.
NOT on domestic traffic.

/C

Re:It's NOT within Sweden's borders

[mr_mischief]

I think the concern in Sweden is about traffic that crosses the borders but which has one endpoint in the country. If you can spy on any traffic crossing the borders, that means that Swedes who communicate internationally or who communicate with other Swedes using international communications infrastructure are just as eligible.

Is there some protection for two Swedes in Sweden who use, for example, Slashdot to communicate?

Re:It's NOT within Sweden's borders

[the4thdimension]

How can they tell the difference in a real-time fashion? Additionally, who is monitoring the "lookers" to ensure they are obeying the rules?

Furthermore, servers are often located all over the world. If you use a chat service of some kind, the information often leaves the area, then returns. Thus, this could be ruled as having been "crossing Swedens borders" but was actually Swedish traffic all along.

I think the overwhelming problems are:

1. Probably not enough oversight to ensure power is not being abused.
2. The ever-present slippery slope
3. Tough to discern the difference between international and local traffic in a uniform way
4. Costs a lot of money for arguable returns

Re:It's NOT within Sweden's borders

[init100]

Is there some protection for two Swedes in Sweden who use, for example, Slashdot to communicate?

In reality, very unlikely. But politicians usually lack everything but the most superficial understanding of computer and network technology, so they think that such protections will exist just because they wrote them into the law.

Several of them has said that FRA won't snoop on communication between swedes, regardless of whether the traffic crosses a border or even if they use international services like GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. But as anyone with a minimum of knowledge in the field knows, this is impossible, especially the claim that such communications won't even be processed. That's clearly either a lie, or at least gross ignorance of the subject.

Re:It's NOT within Sweden's borders

[Znork]

How can they tell the difference in a real-time fashion?

They have what was the #5 of the top known computer clusters in the world.

I think the overwhelming problems are:

The main flaw in the legislation is diverting any and all traffic without explicit court orders targeting specific cases. The rest derive from that.

And I wouldn't say 'arguable' returns, I'd say negative returns. The scheme is trivial to bog down beyond recovery; phrase generators are one thing, a much more useful form of clogging the works would be simply adding variable length encrypted segments of /dev/random to every mail you send. Can't decrypt it, can't prove it isnt decryptable, if you ever have something you actually care to hide you can stick it in the crypt section and you'd be previously whitelisted to avoid your mails bogging the system down or your mail will end up on the queue of unbreakable mails.

The days of a monitorable internet are at their end. Pressure from intellectual monopoly rights holders and the wars on everything have created many projects that are evolving into cell-structured encrypted anonymous darknets; the desire to monitor everyone and everything has created a situation where, soon enough, all communications will be structured akin to subversive cell networks.

Monitor everyone as if they were criminals, and everyone will develop and use tools that protect those being monitored as if they were criminals. Too bad there now is no extra measure to take when you want to monitor actual criminals.

How much do you think the US paid for this?

[bill_kress]

I'm not trying to be a "USA SUCKS" guy (in this case). We obviously have legitimate concerns with Russia and if we aren't doing everything we can to monitor their traffic, we're really screwing up in the intelligence arena (again).

So, if we decided to monitor them, we'd go for the choke point, a place where all the Russian traffic flows, right? Of course Sweeden is a fairly open society (as opposed to ours) and I'm guessing they wouldn't attempt to help us without doing at least the bare minimum "above the covers".

So I suppose I'd be awfully surprised if we weren't behind all this.

Or if you think about it from the other direction--what use would Sweden itself have for intelligence about Russia beyond that of selling/giving it to governments that could do something with it?

Re:How much do you think the US paid for this?

[eddy]

Sweden has always been passing on intelligence to the US. We've lost people to get you the intelligence too. No doubt the laws which forbade FRA from snooping in cables have caused the stream of quality intelligence to the US to dry up, and I'm sure the US put pressure on our officials to get back on track.

That said, I believe this is mostly misdirection, but that's me.

Re:How much do you think the US paid for this?

[faloi]

Sweden and Russia are pretty close geographically, last time I checked. I would think that Sweden would have a lot of use for intelligence as it relates to organized crime in Russia, military activities, industrial accidents that might not be reported through more conventional means for some time... Heck, there's a whole host of reasons that a country might want to keep tabs on a neighbor...especially a neighbor that has historically been a little reluctant to share lots of details with the outside world.

Re:How much do you think the US paid for this?

[init100]

Sweden knows that they have a lot more to fear from Russia

There is one reason why I don't really buy the "we need to snoop on Russia" argument: Why on Earth would we (Sweden) be continually reducing our defense forces (as we are) if Russia is so much a threat that we have to pass such a far-reaching wiretapping law to listen on them? It doesn't make sense. I mean, soon the only thing we could do to fend off an attack would be to throw compute nodes from the FRA supercomputer at the invading Russians, but I hardly think that this would stop them.

Re:How much do you think the US paid for this?

[KeithJM]

Sweden isn't communist, and neither is Russia. Sweden is more socialist than the US, and Russia is certainly struggling with capitalism, but I think you're about 20 years behind the times.

Re:How much do you think the US paid for this?

[yoprst]

And this gets modded insightful... Slashdot populace ain't getting better with time. Finland (unlike Sweden) would have a lot of use for that intelligence, because Finland, unlike, you know, Sweden, actually shares a border with Russia, and suffers from Russian crime (and vice versa, but let's pretend it doesn't happen). We don't hear about Finland snooping on Russia. We also don't hear about Sweden snooping on Russia and passing their data to Finland. What we hear is Sweden working as free intel service for US. In the end the result will be a pissed of Russia, and a warm smile from US administration. Truly an improvement of Swedish security.

Re:How much do you think the US paid for this?

[Holammer]

Sweden has this history of collecting intel and supplying USA/NATO with information in exchange for protection in the event of a war. I believe this snooping law is simply required to hold their end of a bargain. One that dates from the 50's or so. But given the development of the internet the past decade, they need to focus on new ways to gather information. Which might be encouraged or even demanded by some outside party.

Re:Quad-Partison Decision

[mr_mischief]

Monitoring of foreign communications has never been a technical issue in the US within my lifetime, nor a legal issue within my father's lifetime. It's the domestic spying we really need to crack down on first. Then we worry about whether or not we can stop our government from spying on everyone else, or if that's even a good idea.

Help the Pirate Party

[kramer2718]

It is so refreshing to see a political party focused on electronic freedom and sane intellectual property laws.

Help the Pirate Party fight this and other crazy technology laws by donating

From the Torrentfreak blog:

[GameboyRMH]

A few things:

Various viral campaigns have flourished along with grassroots activism and The Pirate Party has hauled full sails to catch the wind that will blow them straight into European Parliament during the elections of 2009.

That would be great, but IIRC they were almost ignored at the polls last time...you don't go from a fringe party getting a negligible number of votes to winning an election in just a few years.

Next, we often speculate at what would happen if a populace were to massively protest a government action, and this is an interesting indication that it wouldn't do a thing. There seems to be more protest action on this in Sweden than there has been on the Iraq war and the FISA bill combined in the states, and the politicians aren't going to budge by the looks of it. Quite frightening.

Third, I love the "FRA: STFU GTFO" banner XD

Re:From the Torrentfreak blog:

[cptnapalm]

"the politicians aren't going to budge by the looks of it"

This surprises you? The EU Constitution was routinely rejected in Europe, so they call it a treaty to get around that pesky voting thing. Then Ireland's people get to vote on it and reject it, so despite the requirement that it be unanimous, they have no intentions of stopping.

Re:From the Torrentfreak blog:

[cptnapalm]

A joke on democracy? Are you kidding me? Individual parlimentary approval is *more* democratic than a national *referendum*?

The way the European governments are going about this is ANTI-democratic.

Re:From the Torrentfreak blog:

[cptnapalm]

How?
Insisting that people do NOT get to vote is democratic? How?
A bunch of politicians, the majority of whom have not read the document either, voting on something AGAINST the the will of the people is democratic? How?

Seriously. By what ass-raped definition of "democracy" can you possibly define what they are doing as democracy?

So who's responsible?

[eebra82]

The Swedish government has kept curiously quiet about the new law's objectives but sources close to the intelligence community say that Russia is the prime target.

This new law is so strange that it makes me think that the Swedish government is under the influence of a larger power.. I wouldn't be surprised if the United States or some other country had something to do with this, but who knows..

Meanwhile, the major opposing party Socialdemokraterna (socialistic democratic party) has vowed to undo the law if it wins the next election.

Re:So who's responsible?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. The Socialist Democratic Party in Sweden has vowed to _change_ the law. They want to add some meaningless part about personal integrity - but keep the surveillance system and data parsing.

In practice, they won't change anything by adding the desired "integrity" paragraph to the law. It would mean that only people who are under suspicion will be monitored - but uhow_ would one do this without having access to - and investigating - each and every data packet?

Re:So who's responsible?

[manwal]

Meanwhile, the major opposing party Socialdemokraterna (socialistic democratic party) has vowed to undo the law if it wins the next election.

And not only that, they've also vowed to redo it!

Re:So who's responsible?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are the ones who originally came up with the new law, most likely they will _remove_ whatever little integrity protection are in the law at that time ....

Re:So who's responsible?

[Exanon]

Actually it's a bit more complicated than that. Let's do a short summary:

We have seven (7) parties in the Riksdag in Sweden, The leftists, the social democrats, the environmentalists (they form a loose group but squabble a lot). We also have the center, the people's party, the christian democrats and the moderate party. These last four parties formed an Alliance (commonly referred to as "the alliance") last election and won.

They are the ones that voted for the law. However, it was the Social democrats who proposed the new law a couple of years back, this is also the party whose minister of justice pushed for a bill in the EUropean parliament that all ISP's in the EU be forced to store traffic data on it's customers for two years. This is the infamous "data retention law".

So right now we have the three opposition parties complaining about the law, when one of them wanted it in the first place. It is unclear if the other two would in fact tear it up, should they come into power.

It's a bloody mess. And to make things worse, we have the "Sverigedemokraterna" (a party with a very cloudy past involving nazimeetings and burnings of Mosque's etc.) using the FRA-law as a hammer to get more voters in the next election.

Some nuggets from the Swedish articles

[MaulerOfEmotards]

Since the references from TFA are mostly in Swedish, I thought I'd translate and share some of the most interesting points.

It should be noted that while the FRA law has been a source of intense debate both within the parliament and population at large, the governing parties have apparently made a point of as far as possible not mentioning it, neither before or after passing the bill. Also, before the bill was passed, the parliamentarians of the coalition parties were instructed to vote the party way (which is unconstitutional) which caused several embers to resign their positions in protest.

TFA notes that when the official silence has been broken, be it in response to the massive criticism or in private but revealed communication, the politicians in charge appear to range from inexcusably ignorant of the subject to criminally incompetent. As an example, it mentions Gunnar Andrén, the leader of the People's Party (folkpartiet) and a member of the liberal ruling coalition, who in a private email to fellow party member and parliamentarian Camilla Lindberg, who went against the internal instructions and voted against the law, expressed anger and recrimination.

This letter was publicised by Miss Lindberg's partner, a fact which made Mr. Andrén lash out in rage, claiming revealing a private letter was "Gestapo- and Stazi like" and "in violation of the Sanctity of Letters" act, a Swedish law that states that it is illegal by any party but the intended recipient to intercept or partake of the contents of a closed letter.

The irony, and what makes an incredibly arse out of him, is evident in the comments on the Swedish article (http://www.politikerbloggen.se/2008/07/03/9359/), a sample:

* "Smart guy, first voting for FRA and then getting pissed when someone does the same on him"
* "the yes-man Andrén is pissed about something he thinks only FRA and the government can do, the right to read others' private mail"
* "I agree with Gunnar Andrén that it is Gestapo methods to read others' letters or tapping phones. Now we know what GA wants in Sweden since he voted yes for FRA"

Re:Some nuggets from the Swedish articles

[init100]

* "Smart guy, first voting for FRA and then getting pissed when someone does the same on him"

This reminds me of another such episode in the FRA drama. Immediately after the bill passed the vote, some members of the pretty politically incorrect forum Flashback started a thread that purported to monitor the surveillance agency FRA, especially its employees. In it, they scoured publicly available sources, such as the FRA web site, Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc, for information on FRA employees, and posted what they found in the thread.

Shortly afterward, the FRA director cried out in the press against the publishing of "protected identities of secret FRA operatives" on the web. He complained that it was unfair and that his employees had a right to privacy. He apparently didn't see any hypocrisy of complaining about the lack of privacy for his own employees while taking away the privacy of everyone else.

Besides, what real "secret operatives with protected identities" have their own Facebook or MySpace page with their real name and FRA email address? Maybe he should inform his "secret agents" about not publishing their personal information on publicly accessible web sites. Not to mention the FRA web page, which contained a thorough organizational scheme with names, etc. He should probably clean up on his own doorstep before crying out in the press that someone had looked at their own web site.

The whole story was beyond funny.

Better link on the DC-3 incident.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't seem to find a good article on that on wikipedia (which is odd), but here'a decent recap from Report on downed DC-3 complete.

"The DC-3 took off from Bromma on the morning of 13 June 1952. The National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) had assigned the aircraft to monitor a large Soviet naval exercise.

A few hours after take off, a telegraph operator at Roslagen's wing in Hägernäs received a call from the aircraft. Contact suddenly disappeared and nothing more was heard. The DC-3 had been shot down by a Soviet fighter aircraft east of Gotska Sandön."

Re:The Red Danger is back

[Halo1]

There's nothing strange about Russia flexing its muscle. The whole reason that Putin became so popular is because he made sure that Russia was again taken seriously after Yeltsin's era. He may be oppressive to a certain extent and the riches may go mainly to his friends, but at least Russia is respected again.

And sure, Putin's Russia (and possible Medvedev's as well) is quite dangerous in various ways. But so are various terrorist organisations. However, they are nothing compared to the political leaders of the so called "free and democratic western world" who use those spectres to completely undermine the foundations of our society and let themselves be used by idiots dreaming about fantasy worlds they can only save by having ever increasing surveillance powers.

They probably honestly think they are doing this for the best of all, but somehow they lose sight of the fact that they are completely destroying whatever it is that they are supposed to be protecting in the process. But when things happen gradually, it's often very hard to notice stuff like that, especially when you're in the middle of it.

Re:haha

[Anonymous Coward]

Harsh, but in the last election they did vote in a bunch of right-wing clagnuts.

You know what Sweden: you vote for arseholes, you get arseholes.

Neighbour concerns

[broeman]

As a neighbour to Sweden, the Danish people and government has voiced their concern with Sweden lately (not the old "forbudssverige" (directly translated "The Forbitten Land" because mainly of their alcohol policies).

Many customers have asked their Internet provider to remove traffic through Sweden if possible, but many IPs use Swedish backbones. The Danish Police Intelligence (if any) is very concerned, since most of their traffic goes through Sweden, and the Minister of Justice wants to contact the Swedish government for information on how it will affect Danish citizens. The Minister of State ("primeminister", he's seldom seen in Denmark lately) and Minister of IT doesn't want to though, as they see it as a "Swedish Case".

At least they are honest about it...

[MrOion]

There is a lot of fuss about the new Swedish law that gives FRA access to snoop on all Internet traffic passing their borders. To be honest, I don't really see the problem here. We have always suspected governments to listen in on Internet traffic, and Sweden is at least open about it.

We all know that as soon as our data goes outside of the network we physically control, we have no guarantee that nobody are tapping the data. This is old news, and we have been aware of it for many years now.

In "the old days" when we wanted to pass messages through "enemy territory", we used something called "encryption". Wouldn't it be an idea to learn from that?