Sweden On Verge of Passing Sweeping Wiretap Plan 234
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."
Sonera moved their email servers because of this (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently their customers were concerned enough.
Not entirely accurate (Score:5, Informative)
Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly: FRA is _not_ a military organization. It's a civil autority that can be used for several other governmental organizations such as the police, secret police, military or even state owned corporations. But the name is confusing, I grant you that.
One interessting thing is that FRA operates the fifth fastest computer on the Top500 list. Most people believe that is was purchased to meet the need of this new surveillance demand.
It's hardly unknown to the public, even if most are not interessted in such matters. Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.
It's already up (Score:2, Informative)
The new bill gives them the right to tap into the cables directly, but it also leaves a possibility for them to share their information with other government bodies, and that is the real kicker. So if you write in an e-mail that you drove home drunk yesterday, that could be used against you in a court of law (in Sweden there are no rules against what can be used as evidence).
FRA claims that this will not be the case, but the new bill would make it lawful to do so.
So in conclusion: Everyone in the world is already being wiretapped by the Swedish government, but this would make it a bit easier for them, and also give them the right to share the information with other Swedish government bodies.
Re:But will it pass? (Score:5, Informative)
Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.
Re:But will it pass? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:At least it's defined in law (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's already up (Score:4, Informative)
More on this from Swedish Pirate Party leader (Score:5, Informative)
More on the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill [rickfalkvinge.se]
Swedish NSA to monitor all phones, Internet [rickfalkvinge.se]
Excerpt from first link:
The bill's name is en anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet [regeringen.se], translating roughly to a better adapted military intelligence gathering. Key points of the bill:
Re:ECHELON? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hate to say this but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:1, Informative)
Really? Has any mainstream newspapers covered this that you are aware of??? The people (you know the ones who voted in the sitting government) are very much in the dark on this. I have not heard a single comment from anyone (besides from the techno
Secondly: FRA is _not_ a military organization. It's a civil autority that can be used for several other governmental organizations such as the police, secret police, military or even state owned corporations. But the name is confusing, I grant you that.
F = Forsvaret = The (Military) Defence('s)
R = Radio = Radio
A = Anstalt = Facility
Due to rethoric, in Sweden we do no have "armed forces", we have "the defence" (which as the name implies can never be used offensively
Just because a military organization helps the civil authorities does not make it non-military.
The name is correct and you are confusing.
One interessting thing is that FRA operates the fifth fastest computer on the Top500 list. Most people believe that is was purchased to meet the need of this new surveillance demand.
Most people know that a swedish military organization was tasked with monitoring Russian / Soviet military movements and intercepting and decrypting their radio traffic. Would such an organization ever need massive computers to do its job? Yes... The organization was the FRA: the Defence's Radio Facility.
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The FRA will probably monitor all your emails from now on, concidering how you seem to represent "most people".
Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thi (Score:5, Informative)
According to Finnish law e-mail has very high level of privacy protection.
So in order not to break Finnish law they were practically forced to move the servers to Finland as they could not guarantee e-mail privacy otherwise.
Re:FRA got new hardware last year (Score:3, Informative)
According to "Ny Teknik" or whatever page I found it's made up of a cluster of 2128 blade servers from HP.
Theoretical max 182 Tflops, seems like it made second place when compared to the june list / when it was done / news out.
It's number fifth on november 2007 list:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/11 [top500.org]
System in question:
http://www.top500.org/system/8819 [top500.org]
Federley's Blog (Score:5, Informative)
"Vad som kommer att ske den 17 juni? Ja vem vet. Kan ju bli pÃ¥kÃrd, sjuk, vara pÃ¥ resande fot, bli gravid eller bara vara dÃr och rÃsta ja. Vem vet. Den dagen den sorgen."
Translation:
"What will happen on the 17:th of June? Well, who knows? I might be hit by a car, become ill, spend the day travelling, become pregnant or just be there and vote yes. That day, that sorrow..."
The sad fact of life is that Swedish MP:s serve almost entirely on the whim of their party leadership. If they make trouble, they get wiped off the list in the next election, and they're gone.
Re:Not entirely accurate (Score:2, Informative)
Actual sources of news are newspapers like DN (the daily news), Göteborgs-posten, Svenska Dagbladed, Sydsvenskan, Dagens Industri, Metro, City etc most of which are read by as many people as the tabloids.
Re:Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:2, Informative)
This is partly correct and partly bullshit. Swedes usually do have a positive view on turning authority over to the state, that part seems to be true. The reasons for why this is true are very much debatable. Some, like historian Peter Englund, point to the fact that the King often stood with the peasantry against the nobility (in contrast to how it was in the rest Europe, where the monarch was the enemy). The monarch being on the side of 'the people' is especially true for relatively modern times (pre-WW1).
Another explanation might be something sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has noted: the working class is much more positively predisposed to authority than upper classes. And Sweden has a large group of people who self-identify as working class.
Of course, there's probably not one isolated reason for why we trust the state as much as we do. But it is certainly not because "it has served us well in the past". We've been royally screwed by them several times in the past. IB-affären, comes to mind, as does the non-existance of civil liberties during WW2.
About IB-affären in English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsbyran [wikipedia.org]
The Swedish News in English Story on this (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.thelocal.se/12252/20080605/ [thelocal.se]
Re:But will it pass? (Score:2, Informative)
In all other countries it's easy to get thrown out of a party meaning that you have little chance to ever again make an impact on politics. But sometimes this means that you just got "unelected".
So acting all "courageous" wouldn't have done any good.
But the european system doesn't represent the will of the majority so much as it goes as far as what some 50% of the population will not revolt over (which isn't all that far).
This isn't America were you have coherent government. This is Europe. If you want to understand European politics think "how would a government react if the president were republican, the vice president democratic, the secretary of state republican,
In other words you get the combined downsides of all parties : massive taxes (democrat), sweeping investigative powers (rep.), no freedom of speech (dem.), direct judicial interference by unions (dem.),
And if you have an issue like nuclear power, which one of the parties thinks unacceptable, only an absolute majority (which almost never happens, > 66% for one party) can TRY to override it, and even then you'll never hear the end of it on TV.
European governments are utterly blocked and halted things. They never do anything. The EU only manages to do things because it's a completely undemocratic institution governed by unelected (appointed by the prime minister of the respective countries) representatives. In other words : it's like the american executive power : with a few qualifications it's in the hands of one singular person, but it's a law-giving AND executive AND judicial power.
Therefore laws like this don't make sense, since the EU can simply override them. Making them worse (or better, but I've yet to see that happen)
Telia-Sonera (Score:2, Informative)
The outage affected key standards sites covering the OOXML problem [groklaw.net]. The outage suddenly lifted hours after the OOXML vote.
The blockage was marketed as an attempt to break net neutrality. However, choosing a network hosting key information sites at a crucial period just prior to an important decision was a bit of cleverness.
Telia-Sonera could have easily routed around the outage, but chose not to. As a result, Telia-Sonera's customers (both business and private) were blocked by actions/inactions by Telia-Sonera from accessing sites which were hosted by or used DNS services on that other network.
Sweden did this also in 1940! (Score:1, Informative)
More about that here: http://www.ams.org/notices/200308/rev-bauer.pdf
Re:all of which i agree with (Score:2, Informative)