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Watching the IPRED Watchers In Sweden

digithed writes "In response to Sweden's recent introduction of new laws (discussed here recently) implementing the European IPRED directive, a new Swedish Web site has been launched allowing users to check if their IP address is currently under investigation. The site also allows users to subscribe for email updates alerting them if their IP address comes under investigation in the future, or to report IP addresses known to be under investigation. This interesting use of people power 'watching the watchers' is possible because the new Swedish laws implementing the IPRED directive require a public request to the courts in order to get ISPs to forcibly disclose potentially sensitive private information. Since all court records are public in Sweden, it will be easy to compile a list of addresses currently being investigated."

9 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Swedish does not derive from Latin by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thats a terrible analogy. I am a native English speaker and I did not hear of habeas corpus until recently.

    OTH my wife is a native Cantonese speaker and I have noticed the trouble she has in English with the concepts of lights vs mirrors, ground vs floor and gate vs door.

  2. Re:Government accountability by emilv · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, but this is Sweden. The motto of our police force are something along the lines of "Raidin' The Pirate Bay and keepin' their servers forever". Thus, your comment are not at all inappropriate to describe Sweden.

  3. Re:Swedish does not derive from Latin by proton · · Score: 5, Informative

    As a swede, I can say that our laws seems to function quite alot better than the american laws do.

    We actually have the freedom to watch our watchers (in most cases). The government is quite significantly more "for the people by the people" than in the United States.

    And just for you, the european human rights convention explictly states "habeas corpus" rights, although not under the title "habeas corpus". This convention is also considered part of swedish law since 1998.

    And we certainly have the sense not to run camps were our "habeas corpus" doesnt apply...

  4. Re:Legislating towards IPv6 by Zarhan · · Score: 3, Informative

    IPv6 has a nice little RFC going for it - Cryptographically generated addresses (CGA), defined in RFC 3972. Consider the possibility where every TCP/UDP session, or even every packet, comes from a different address...

  5. Re:127.0.0.1 by HonIsCool · · Score: 3, Informative

    Not exactly. I think that in the USA, the police can also get the information from the ISPs, no?

    --
    "Give me six lines of C++ code written by the most competent programmer, and I will find enough in there to hang him."
  6. Re:Swedish does not derive from Latin by Kjellander · · Score: 3, Informative

    English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.) Swedish and English actually come from the same language family (Germanic) and share a large number of words.

    Not only that. A lot more English words than you think are borrowed from old Norse, the root of Swedish, Danish , Icelandic and Norwegian, and this because we Vikings invaded a thousand years ago.

    Don't believe me, check out the etymology on the word window, which means eye to the wind. (Swedish has since borrowed the German word Fenster into the word fönster, but that is beside the point. Norwegian still uses vindue)

    Think about that next time you see for instance Microsoft's trademark on a +1000 year old Norse word, vindauga.

  7. Doesn't work that way by bigmouth_strikes · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are no scripts involved in this. As much as it may disturb basement-dwellers, exercising your Swedish freedom of information involves showing up at the specific public office/gov't branch/etc yourself.

    You have to show up at the court in person and ask to see any documents pertaining to specific IP-addresses. The court is not obliged to prepare lists or in any other way format the data; they will just hand out the entire court document itself for you to sift through. The work is also expected to be "reasonable", which is why you just can't show up with 1000 ip-addresses every day.

    The general idea behind the Swedish freedom of information is that you know what you're looking for, not that you're scanning everything in order to find something interesting. This of course makes it hard to apply in cases like IPRED where you may not be informed that you are under investigation until after a whole month.

    --
    Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
  8. Re:Swedish does not derive from Latin by Petrushka · · Score: 3, Informative

    > English is also not derived from Latin (although it does borrow a large amount of words from Latin.)

    It borrows to within less than 1% as many words from Latin as from the biggest influence, so where it's derived from is something of a moot point for the purpose of this argument!

    Latin/Romance-derived words in your post (including the quotation, since including it actually works in favour of your claim):
    derived, Latin, large, amount, Latin, per cent, Latin, influence, derived, point, purpose, argument.
    Total count: 11.

    Germanic words in your post:
    English, is, also, not, from, although, it, does, borrow, a, of, words, from, it, borrows, to, within, less, than, one, as, many, words, from, as, from, the, biggest, so, where, it, is, from, is, something, of, a, moot, for, the, of, this.
    Total count: 42.

    I hope that clarifies the slip in your reasoning.

  9. Re:Swedish does not derive from Latin by blackest_k · · Score: 3, Informative

    I am not a linguist however it doesn't seem to be an unreasonable hypothesis, one of the problems in translation is finding reasonably equivalent phrases between languages.

    Within any individual language there are specialized vocabularies that people outside the profession have very little grasp of, the language of stockbrokers or software engineers or marketing for example.

    I believe thats referred to the domain of discourse. Within different languages there are subtle differences between what we would think of as universal concepts. For example the word you in Japanese has maybe 7 roughly equivalent words, the difference is directly related to the relative positions of the two speakers in relation to each other and society. In Polish for example there is a similar difference where there are formal and familiar forms of discourse. If your being respectful then you use the third party form of verbs. As nonnative speakers we are liable to trample all over that difference and may be considered rude or ignorant.

    I believe 0 was late to arrive in mathematics but it made a considerable impact on thinking about numbers. Of course there is a tendency of languages to assimilate words from other languages sometimes with a direct relation such as the word bungalow which comes from india or a different meaning such as 'handy' which I believe the Germans use for 'Cell phone' or 'Mobile'. I've not even touched on English idiom which can really baffle non native speakers yet can be extremely vivid concepts for native speakers.

    The problem with the hypothesis is that if I were fluent enough to recognize a conceptual difference in one language and were able to convey that concept to you in English or another language then that concept is no longer constrained by its original language.

    However the essential idea that language is a framework in which we express our idea's is quite reasonable, the idea that frameworks differ between languages and individuals also seems reasonable, however these frameworks are not fixed and can be expanded on. So given two differing frameworks it is likely that a difference in the concepts as expressed in two different languages may lead to different approaches which may yield different results. Chances are that if it's important enough the language frameworks will be modified to share the concept. Obviously change is ongoing so differences will become more subtle, but it's obvious that if you talked about working with computers for example to someone from the 1900's the concept computer used to be a man who worked with mathematics and windows were glass panels set into walls. I've no doubt you could teach the modern day concepts to someone from the 1900's but then your modifying his frame of reference.

    As a final thought I'm reminded of a scifi story where a stricken spacecraft needed instruction from earth to be able to avoid disaster but the delay in sending a communication and receiving the answer meant there wouldnt be enough time to avoid disaster, the problem was solved by the presidents wife who told them to speak at the same time in her field of expertise gossiping nothing would get done if they waited for one party to relay one story before they related their own.