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Wiretapping Law Sparks Rage In Sweden
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:18 AM
from the taking-it-to-the-streets dept.
from the taking-it-to-the-streets dept.
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."
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Your Rights Online: Sweden On Verge of Passing Sweeping Wiretap Plan 234 comments
An anonymous reader writes "No one seems to have noticed that Sweden is close to passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government's spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country. If a bill before parliament becomes law, the country's National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) will monitor all internet traffic that passes in or out of the country. As the article notes, there's a good chance email traveling from, say, the UK to Finland would be fair game, since it's likely to traverse through Sweden before reaching its final destination. So far, there's been nary a peep from Swedish media about the plan."
[+]
Your Rights Online: Wiretapping Bill Passes Swedish Parliament, 143 to 138 326 comments
Assar Bruno Boveri writes "Swedish lawmakers came down in favour of a fiercely debated surveillance bill in a vote at the Riksdag on Wednesday evening. Despite some cosmetic changes, Sweden's proposed surveillance law is still a monster, writes Pär Ström from the independent New Welfare Foundation." The Swedish newspaper DN (in Swedish; translations welcome) compares the implications of the proposed law with activities carried out by East Germany's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (STASI).
[+]
Ask Slashdot: Safeguarding Data From Big Brother Sven? 345 comments
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So, what are the best solutions for seamless email encryption, search privacy, etc? What are your experiences with PGP vs GPG vs ...? In this day and age, why is the use of this type of privacy technologies still so limited? Why isn't there a larger movement promoting the use of privacy tools? Also, what is in your opinion the largest privacy concern? Search tracking? Email transfer?
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[+]
Your Rights Online: SSL Encryption Coming To The Pirate Bay 267 comments
An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay, in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law, will start offering SSL encryption to its user base this week. Although copyright issues really have little to do with national security, The Pirate Bay knows its population is uneasy with the recent legal change. The encryption will mostly benefit Swedish users living under the current law. Since The Pirate Bay and its servers are not hosted in Sweden, the additional security offered to outside users could be comparatively minimal."
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Where's the outrage in the rest of the free world? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Informative)
Well if they don't have time to read it they could just listen. [audiopod.ca]
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
I myself use an approach that doesn't sound so "cool" as a shouting slogan is, but which people accept much more easily: I actually explain what the issue with government is. I tell them basically this: that any group, by being a collective of individuals, has a collective "moral level" that is at best the average of the "moral level" of each individual that's part of it. Thus, government being a collective group composed of all the people in government, you just have to ask yourself what's the typical politician's morals. If you can answer that, you can answer what's the average moral level of government itself. Compare that to the average moral level of the population as a whole, and it becomes pretty clear that government is almost by definition "just worse".
By switching from a "good vs. evil" discourse to one of relative scales where neither "us" nor "them" are at either extreme, but we both are in the middle, "they" just a little below than "us", those with whom I talk recognize that yes, we actually must watch government carefully so that they don't drop "too much".
Longer, but truer. And by being truer, it just works.
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Our Voices Have Been Muzzled (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Funny)
What sort of meat comes with the greens?
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I first read 1984 at high school circa 1974. I think you need to bear in mind that the OP looks like an attempt at insightfull humour.
OT Trivia: In the appendix of my old copy it says (paraphrase) "C is a precise language used only by technocrats".
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Not anymore. (Score:3, Interesting)
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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Re:Not anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Informative)
One of the clearest statements of the goal of making the state "wither away" is in Lenins "The State and Revolution" which is mainly concerned exactly with the abolition of the state. For example:
Arguably that is one of the chief sources of the Marxist-Leninist view of the state.
Note that Lenin did not advocate the removal of the state immediately - on the contrary he though it necessary as a way of suppressing the capitalists after a socialist revolution. This too is firmly rooted in Marx' and Engels writings - being the basis of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" in contrast to the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" which was a term Marx' and Engels used to refer to capitalist "democracies" that oppress the poor.
What confuses people is often that what Lenin and his successors called a socialist state, people in the west started calling communist.
One can argue over whether even the socialist label of that society was true, and to what extent they followed their own supposed principles once they gained power or whether the many reprehensible actions taken were a perversion or abuse of the symbolism and support they had built with no connection to the original ideology. Regardless of which side one falls down on in that discussion, it should be quite clear that there was never even any indication from the Soviet leadership that the saw their society as communism in any shape, way or form - it was at least in name intended to be socialism.
This becomes even more clear if one studies the debates that raged in early Soviet society over how soon the transition to communism would be complete, and where depending on who and when you asked the answer might be anything from a generation in the future to hundreds of years - communism was seen as a long term goal by most people.
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
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.
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Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Congressmen don't read bills. (Score:3)
Further, since 1998 the media has had an agenda, and has become a close bed fellow with legislators.
they trade favors, and have obviously developed a strict code of conduct to cover for one another's acts.
I see no reason why the current media wouldn't help the republican administration by threatening blitzes against those who refused to vote for the act.
Frankly, this won't stop until every media company is broken into 8 or more smaller companies, and all current officers are
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
"You supply the story -- I'll supply the war!"
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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2 facts (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Bit confused (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Bit confused (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, people are slow - they reject it until it's in their faces and they are forced to act. Most people think that spying on the enemies is a good thing, but they never realized that they themselves, and their neighbors, would be wiretapped. That's why the uproar.
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or until a couple of days ago... (Score:3, Informative)
But I guess in this case, more publicity is actually doing good.
Protest site (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Protest site (Score:5, Informative)
integritetsintrång = invasion of integrity
utredningsbegäran = request for official enquiry
åsiktsregistrering = (political) view tracking
Ask for the "integritetsintrång" pen holder at your local IKEA!
Jokes aside, I find it interesting that it is the conservative and liberal parties who push for this law (though they are the ones who around elections claim they campaign for freedom and individuality).
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This is not an isolated incident (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
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 lo
Internet == Civil Rights Movement (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, as the internet grows more adept at connecting disparate people, the less likely we'll be willing to fight wars. I can go right now and become friends or at least become familiar with someone from China, Iran, Egypt, and even Iraq. Wars, especially for America, are extremely profitable for the propertied classes. It's the reason businesses like Standard Oil sold to the Nazis and the British in WWII. It's the reason IBM had no qualms helping the Germans index Jews for extermination. Now these same companies lobby to congresspeople on a daily basis, and you and I will probably never meet our representatives in person.
And people wonder why the needs of the people aren't being met. It's really quite simple - the people don't matter to most governments. They are the enemy. The people at the top -- you know, the 1 percent of people who own nearly half of all investments in the stock market -- really like things the way they are.
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Quick way to make for less technology companies (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:what about encryption? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:what about encryption? (Score:4, Insightful)
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They would.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:what about encryption? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I know of two men who will be available for such a position on January 20th, 2009. Their resume in this subject area is quite impressive. That is if you are not selective about grammar by one of them.
Re:Shit, (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweden has one of the biggest watching Brothers in the world. We've been registered for hundreds of years - first by the church, then by the state. We don't need to register ourselves to vote - the state knows if we are qualified. Most of us don't need to do our taxes, just send an SMS to confirm that the numbers are correct - the state already knows how much we've earned, how much we own, and how much we've got saved in bank accounts and shares.
And we trust Big Brother. We've voted for the social democrats for the most part the last hundred years. Parties win elections by promising tax raises. We trust Big Brother.
We're seen as a copyright safe haven because our laws are not yet draconian, but it's all a process. Our anti-commercialism of course plays a role here. Big scary USA companies want to create and enforce laws in Sweden? No way!
Still, people don't see Big Brother as Big Brother watching, but rather as Big Brother making things easier and helping us when we need him. That's probably why this law has become so controversial. It does not help Swedish citizens. We're not afraid of "terrorism". Our government can't pull that crap on us.
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