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."
Re:Hate to say this but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweden? wtf? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, just another out-of-control power grab, no doubt MAFIAA approved, with a healthy side-dose of "fuck you" to privacy.
Re:Hate to say this but... (Score:5, Insightful)
When the US put pressure on Sweden for ThePirateBay Swedish authorities happily broke multiple laws and smiled about it. I have no doubts that any information about petty things like small time copyright infringement will be handed over.
Re:I thought the UK was on the road to 1984... (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon, let's give some airtime to Hiro Protagonist and Bernard Marx at least. That's more where this kind of shit is headed to...
what seems to absurd to me (Score:5, Insightful)
encrypt if you don't want it snooped on. if it goes out on the wire, it is prone to being intercepted and snooped on, by the government or someone else. you realize that, right? so where is all the shock and amazement coming from that a government is doing what governments always do?
i'm not saying you don't have a right to privacy. i'm saying you are absurd if you rely on a government organization to protect your privacy for you. regardless of the law. YOU need to protect your privacy. you can't expect the government to do that competently, regardless of the law. and then, in a forum populated with a bunch of people supposedly experienced enough with the subject matter, to come from this position of complete naivete on the subject?
all i am saying is that its just kind of disingenuous for a lot of you, who to start from the default position of healthy distrust of government... to suddenly express shock and amazement at a government trying to snoop on you. this is a new concept to you? you're not jaded and cynical at this point, as you SHOULD be on the subject matter of governments and snooping if you have any awareness of the subject matter? folks: your shock and amazement is only possible if massive trust in government is your default position. you see the absurdity in that, right?
"omg! my government wants to spy on me? the idea never occured to me!"
really?
Re:I thought the UK was on the road to 1984... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Such as?
You mean your trust. I, for one, do not trust them anymore than any other government. And in what instance did it serve us well in the past?
Encrypt everything. ALL of it. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what seems to absurd to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Encrypt everything. ALL of it. (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've heard the snoops care more about who is talking to who than about what's actually being said. Mapping social networks and all that.
So in addition to encryption, we would all have to run anonymising proxies, such as Tor or Freenet.
Yes, any evidence can be used (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that I think these laws will be passed to please the music and movie industries, but they could certainly use any evidence passed to them from this perfect, ever watching organization.
WTF?! (Score:4, Insightful)
It can't be militarily inspired either; Sweden is "non aligned" and has (officially) maintained a neutral stance in all wars for (nearly) the last 200 years, and they are not a party to NATO or a similar organization/treaty. Sweden has, in fact, the longest tenure of neutrality of any country in the world (yes, that includes Switzerland).
So, they're going to wage war against, and gather enormous amounts of intelligence on, its own citizens, instead? Are they going to raise the already highest tax rates in the world to pay for this needless Britain-esque surveillance?
This has nothing to do with terrorists or drugs, and everything to do with copyright "enforcement" and having more "legal" ways to gather data on Pirate Bay, their users, and other services that may set up shop there. There's no other plausible explanation.
Re:But will it pass? (Score:5, Insightful)
The only parites that have had a consitently negative attitude towards this proposal has been the left party and the greens. One of the will get my vote in the next election.
Tit for tat? (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States has already said that pretty much any private communication it can get hold of is fair game. Does anybody have the feeling that a lot of other countries are responding by taking the view that, "If you read my mail, I"m sure as hell going to read yours."
You understand the US Constitution WELL (Score:5, Insightful)
My God, if only Americans understood the US Constitution as well as you do, with that statement.
Re:WTF?! (Score:3, Insightful)
File it under "delusions of grandeur". Our politicos like to think that Sweden is important enough to be considered a terrorist target.
"Officially", yes. Practically, not so much. We (the government, that is) bend over for the guy with the biggest guns, and have done so since World War One.
Re:so you believe in a scenario (Score:2, Insightful)
Potential For Good (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious counter is to make encryption without a back door illegal. With mobile open source projects which can set up home in any nation (or no nation) though, I think that the governments ability to enforce such absurdity would be rendered impotent.
Re:But will it pass? (Score:5, Insightful)
So now the US is on the verge of "throwing the bums out" again. I guess it's not 100% hopeless for those of us who are fans of gridlock: the Democrats who are poised to take power have much internal squabbling and no coherent direction other than "away from George Bush", and can barely agree on anything themselves, so I'm not too worried that they'll pass much of their crazy platform either.
Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thi (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Potential For Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Agreed.
I can see the obvious counter to that, and I don't like it at all. Thy will just make open source illegal, programming or asking about programming will be on par with e.g. chemistry, explosives, weaponry,
You see, laying down before oppressor's tanks doesn't stop them if they don't care. Likewise, if we fight to keep our freedom, and use another freedom as a weapon (or an armor) we may as well lose both freedoms
Sometimes, a great tree falls down, and you can not save it from falling, you would get killed if you try to hold it from falling down, so you just step aside. One day, very far in the future, another tree will grow up to be as great as fallen was. Each tyranny ends in rot, eventually, if it cannot be ended by heroic deeds. If we choose today not to confront vigorously, not to give excuse to get struck down on a point which is of very little majority-perceived public interest, all that Big Brother nonsense will grow into bloat and die out from too much expense and gradually getting on nerves of increasingly too many "ordinary" (non-nerd) people.
For those with cheaper tickets, in short, this is the end of an era. It will come back, but not in our lifetime. And now something completely different
Re:Potential For Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But will it pass? (Score:3, Insightful)
European governments are utterly blocked and halted things. They never do anything.
You actually meant "they manage to do everything all at once, even the contradictory things, thus making most of what they do meaningless"? Because "they never do anything" implies that none of these laws get passed (which is what happens in the US when the parties are evenly balanced), but you're saying now that they just ALL get passed and because of that nothing works.
And this is because the Ministers of various things are free to act in whatever way suits their party without approval by Parliament, is that right? (Just trying to understand how this works. In the US, you do have different departments that can do some things autonomously, but in the end they all still answer to Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court and many of their ideas/proposals have to be directly approved by Congress. For instance, the Dept of Education couldn't just declare No Child Left Behind to be official policy, Congress had to approve it.)
Re:so let me get this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it isn't even remotely that simple. Governments change. "Behaviors" which were benign under one regime may not be so benign under the next, or after a particularly spectacular national trauma removes previously-accepted constraints. When you allow those behaviors to be encoded into law, they are much more difficult to remedy when they are eventually abused.
You sound like one of those Free Republic types who defend the Bush Administration's endless expansions-by-fiat of executive power. I really wish those people would have had the chance to stand aside, powerless, while the same rationalizations were employed by Hillary Clinton. Maybe then they'd have remembered why they they joined the Republican party in the first place.
Re:Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you realize, that "state funded" means "paid with remains of the money taken from the citizens (after most of it were wasted)"?
Back to the topic - it seems Sweden had a great luck and avoided the kind of scum most countries have in their governments. It's not only USA where people distrust their rulers, and most of the time rightly so.
You've been lucky, but can you be sure it will continue? I'm not American yet I share a belief that the governemt should not know too much about it's subjects. Too much knowledge causes abuse, both small by some official and big, by the state itself. Besides, most of these thing they do not need to know - your health is your business and it should be a secret between you and your doctor, not something any petty clerk could look up when he's bored - like it happened not so long ago in Ireland.