Wiretapping Law Sparks Rage In Sweden 344
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."
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Insightful)
what about encryption? (Score:1, Insightful)
Or can they snoop encrypted messages too?
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what about encryption? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what about encryption? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't get it.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Personally, I've given up caring about what governments do. Until the general population is ready to literally rip their government down, nothing is going to change. Somebody should really start by assassinating a few key politicians and corporate lobbyists. (Hrm, I wonder if a sentence like that is enough to land a person in Guantanamo these days).
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".
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: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.
Re:what about encryption? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
Quick way to make for less technology companies (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Congressmen don't read bills. (Score:3, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you.
"You supply the story -- I'll supply the war!"
Rediculous. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not anymore. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:what about encryption? (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to both use encryption and an anonymizing proxy server/network to protect yourself. Of course, communicating with an anonymizing proxy will of course get you noticed also.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Insightful)
hey, we're pretty annoyed. and we're about to do som-
**OMG, did you hear - newegg has a gigabit switch on sale for $9!! kewl! **
uhh, what were you saying, again? oh yeah, we're really pissed off about this freedom stuff. we really are.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:2, Insightful)
You should be a little more abstract and fear "large organizations", which would include governments AND companies. (There are, of course, other forms of organization, but governments & companies are the only ones I can think of which become large enough to become a serious problem to societal health.)
Any organization that grows large enough, whether it be government or company, is more likely to become both corrupt & have the resources to crush opposition.
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.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's wrong with our governments? (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is more with the people who elect the governments. They are buying into the scares that the government presents them with and giving the governments more control - ostensibly to catch the bad guys, but definitely restricting the freedom, privacy, and security of the good guys.
I am happy to see that the Swedes are standing up against this new restriction of their privacy. Good luck to them, and let's follow their example.
They Have a Choice? (Score:3, Insightful)
It takes time and they need to start now building the infrastructure. My point is, how are the governments who see what's coming, plan to maintain order when the population grows beyond their capacity to police it if they don't use automation?
Considering the population limit that the Earth can reasonably support is around seven billion using artificial energy like hydrocarbon. Take away artificial energy (peak oil) and the Earth can only support about three billion. Add to that changing climate, changing growing patterns, water shortages... Smart government leaders are anticipating and planning for the eventual chaos.
When the Earth eventually reverts back to being able to support (only) two billion and there's 12 billion to feed how will governments control the populace unless the steps are taken today to build the infrastructure to control the population? No legislation will solve the problem. They can only plan for it.
-[d]-
Re:Our Voices Have Been Muzzled (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Insightful)
This is important. I'm replying just in case anyone has AC filter on.
Re:Our Voices Have Been Muzzled (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what we fucking need. So it's more than just hitting the streets, it's more than just voting, it's actually hitting these stations where it fucking hurts. The protests should be AT THE STATIONS, not in front of the fucking Whitehouse!!!
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So much for (Score:3, Insightful)
Once the illegal wiretapping is in place, any plans that you have will be countered politically.
Any oversight will be nullified.
If you had rights in Sweden, they'll start deteriorating soon.
Then your economy is going to go to shit.
Sounds like you've already got your fascist media in place.
Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Insightful)
If the election were to have been Kucinich versus Paul, the media would be in crisis mode. The next president is determined by media manipulation early in the primary debate process, before the general population has a clue of what's going on. This is done by framing who is the "front runner", who is the "fringe kook", etc. Huckabee's surge was controlled and set up by Anderson Cooper's "Jesus" question.
YouTube clips made this manipulation too obvious to too many people, and it is imperative for the powers that be behind the scenes to control information flow with things like DMCA takedown notices, making independent news delivery on the internet too expensive, and using jack boot thug scare tactics such as wiretapping and invasion of privacy to try and stem the tide of a never before seen giant international town hall of message board talking heads competing directly with the officially sanctioned opinion shapers. This is a Berlin Wall falling historical moment.
"Jeez... if only Americans" (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, I get it, there's a lot of people here who hate Bush, blah, blah, blah. I'm not debating whether Bush is evil, or has eroded Constitutional rights, or hates cute little animals in ANWR, or whatever. You know why? Because that's not the point of the frickin' article, that's why.
The sad thing is, you can look in just about any article around here, and sooner or later the discussion devolves into the same thing: "Stupid Amerikuns luv there beer, gas guzzlin cars, gunz, and red meet all because of frickin' Bush, who is stealin our rites". That happening here makes about as much sense as a Linux kernel discussion spontaneously breaking out on the Huffington Post every day.
I'm not saying the FP doesn't have a point about the erosion of our Constitutional rights, and I enjoy reading some of the more thoughtful posts. I even get a chuckle out of some of the way-out tinfoil hat rants. I'm just sick of every discussion going down the same off-topic US-centric rabbit hole. No wonder everyone else says that we here in the US can't seem to think outside our borders for more than a nanosecond.
People, for crying out loud, focus, will you? Does anyone here actually have much of anything to say about wiretapping in Sweden?
Re:what about encryption? (Score:1, Insightful)
Basically this law won't impact the people that know what they are doing, it might catch some of the more retarded criminals, and it will do so at a high cost to privacy for regular folks. The people that actually know and care about these things will be able to avoid it, criminals and good folks alike.
Re:Where's the outrage in the rest of the free wor (Score:3, Insightful)
As for "mentioning religion", I have no problem if an elected official is religious and uses that fact as a part of his/her campaign. But I do get very upset if I hear that elected official voting for laws that favor one set of beliefs over another, or using his personal religious justification to argue for a law (gay marriage, anyone?). If a law is really that good of an idea, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with an argument that doesn't rely on a religious dogma. No, the Second Amendment to the US Constitution does not protect the right to hunt. Never has, never will. The Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to be responsible for defense of community (and by extension, yourself).
As for "never meant for a modern world", that's also false. If you owned property in or near the LA riots of 1992, or in Southern Louisiana for about three months after Katrina, or were in one of the wrong classrooms at Virginia Tech, or any number of other more local instances where the police either opted out "until the dust settled" or were unable to prevent "bad things" from happening, you would know that you are still personally responsible for your own safety.
The Second Amendment is highly relevant in the modern world, in it's original wording, with it's original intent. Activist court? Ugh. You're one of those people.
You don't seem to be aware that invalidating laws that violate the constitution and/or lawful treaties is the responsibility of the judicial branch. Nullification is a critical check and balance that the courts have to offset the sometimes overreaching efforts of the legislature and executive. And that every time a court uses that power, it's necessarily saying that something passed by a majority vote is in fact, a really bad idea?
Go back to high school civics. You were apparently napping at a few critical moments.