Sweden's Snoop Law Targets Russia 186
praps writes "There's been much controversy lately over Sweden's new law which allows the signal intelligence agency (FRA) to monitor all data traffic within the country's borders. The Swedish government has kept curiously quiet about the new law's objectives but sources close to the intelligence community say that Russia is the prime target. '"80 percent of Russia's contacts with large parts of the world travel through cables in Sweden. That is the core of the issue," said one source.'" Related: EuroConcerned writes "Many things are happening in Sweden after the new legislation on wiretapping has been voted.
TorrentFreak has an article on what's going on, including massive protests and Google moving their servers away from the country."
Re:solution to these sorts of problems (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure how a discussion about how out of touch the politicians who pass laws like this have to be and how full-time professional politicians are bad for society gets modded off-topic, even if it is formatted as a typical joke.
The whole problem with a law like this is that people are getting paid to sit around full-time and think about how to have an impact on the lives of others. Many of the problems in the world are because politicians have too much impact on the daily lives of others. Obstructionism in government preserves the freedom of the people.
Help the Pirate Party (Score:5, Interesting)
It is so refreshing to see a political party focused on electronic freedom and sane intellectual property laws.
Help the Pirate Party [piratpartiet.se] fight this and other crazy technology laws by donating [piratpartiet.se]
Re:How much do you think the US paid for this? (Score:1, Interesting)
That absurd law specifically mentions the sale of such information to other nations.
Re:How much do you think the US paid for this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sweden has always been passing on intelligence to the US. We've lost people to get you the intelligence too [wikipedia.org]. No doubt the laws which forbade FRA from snooping in cables have caused the stream of quality intelligence to the US to dry up, and I'm sure the US put pressure on our officials to get back on track.
That said, I believe this is mostly misdirection, but that's me.
Re:It's NOT within Sweden's borders (Score:3, Interesting)
How can they tell the difference in a real-time fashion?
They have what was the #5 of the top known computer clusters in the world.
I think the overwhelming problems are:
The main flaw in the legislation is diverting any and all traffic without explicit court orders targeting specific cases. The rest derive from that.
And I wouldn't say 'arguable' returns, I'd say negative returns. The scheme is trivial to bog down beyond recovery; phrase generators are one thing, a much more useful form of clogging the works would be simply adding variable length encrypted segments of /dev/random to every mail you send. Can't decrypt it, can't prove it isnt decryptable, if you ever have something you actually care to hide you can stick it in the crypt section and you'd be previously whitelisted to avoid your mails bogging the system down or your mail will end up on the queue of unbreakable mails.
The days of a monitorable internet are at their end. Pressure from intellectual monopoly rights holders and the wars on everything have created many projects that are evolving into cell-structured encrypted anonymous darknets; the desire to monitor everyone and everything has created a situation where, soon enough, all communications will be structured akin to subversive cell networks.
Monitor everyone as if they were criminals, and everyone will develop and use tools that protect those being monitored as if they were criminals. Too bad there now is no extra measure to take when you want to monitor actual criminals.
Re:Some nuggets from the Swedish articles (Score:5, Interesting)
* "Smart guy, first voting for FRA and then getting pissed when someone does the same on him"
This reminds me of another such episode in the FRA drama. Immediately after the bill passed the vote, some members of the pretty politically incorrect forum Flashback started a thread that purported to monitor the surveillance agency FRA, especially its employees. In it, they scoured publicly available sources, such as the FRA web site, Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc, for information on FRA employees, and posted what they found in the thread.
Shortly afterward, the FRA director cried out in the press against the publishing of "protected identities of secret FRA operatives" on the web. He complained that it was unfair and that his employees had a right to privacy. He apparently didn't see any hypocrisy of complaining about the lack of privacy for his own employees while taking away the privacy of everyone else.
Besides, what real "secret operatives with protected identities" have their own Facebook or MySpace page with their real name and FRA email address? Maybe he should inform his "secret agents" about not publishing their personal information on publicly accessible web sites. Not to mention the FRA web page, which contained a thorough organizational scheme with names, etc. He should probably clean up on his own doorstep before crying out in the press that someone had looked at their own web site.
The whole story was beyond funny.
Re:So who's responsible? (Score:2, Interesting)
They are the ones who originally came up with the new law, most likely they will _remove_ whatever little integrity protection are in the law at that time ....
Re:How much do you think the US paid for this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:now that's funny (Score:2, Interesting)
In a Swedish tv-program called Uppdrag Granskning (I believe -- may have been another program), a journalist walked around and asked politicians about the propositions they'd voted for.
I don't believe a single one of them actually knew what they were voting for.
Seriously, they don't read them. They don't care. I kind of doubt any other "democracy" works any differently.
It pisses me off to no end.
(No, I didn't vote for any of them).
Re:So who's responsible? (Score:1, Interesting)
It is said that Socialdemokraterna started the thing.
My opinion (I live in Sweden) is that socialdemokraterna are just aiming for cheap points; that they will never stop the law if they get the ruling position.
Historically they have spied domestically before, "IB-affären".
I have no trust for their leader either due to her behaviour ealier but that is out of scope.
Switzerland (Score:1, Interesting)
That country already exists. It's called Switzerland [wikipedia.org].
If the people can gather 50.000 signatures against a law within 100 days after it is proposal, the law is voted on in a public referendum.
Re:now that's funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, but when I decide on something that is against the interests of my employer (remember, politicians are essentially our employees), and when asked why I decided that way my answer is "no idea, I don't have the foggiest about the thingamajig, but it sounded cool", what will my employer do?
Re:now that's funny (Score:2, Interesting)
Since you've used the experience card, I shall too: I've lived in several Euro Countries, for years. I've followed debates in the national assembly of France in French, and of course Parliament in the UK. News in Dutch, and so on.
You are a real polyglot. Do you also speak Finnish? How about Hungarian?
Compare Harry Reid for example with another democrat, Lieberman.
Last time I checked Lieberman was an independent (one of only two in the Senate).
Maxine Waters is just one example of the 'out there' wing of the democratic party
Those are outliers. Every European parliament has its Ron Pauls and Maxine Waters too (Jean-Marie Le Pen and Alessandra Mussolini come to mind). That is not what I am talking about. When I think of ideology, I mean those core issues which a person or a party does not consider open for compromise. Here is an example: in 1999 the German Green Party was part of the governing coalition (with the Social-Democrats) at the time when Germany dispatched troops abroad for the first time since WWII, as part of the NATO deployment in Kosovo. This triggered a wave a mass resignations in the party, as nonviolence is one of the core issues of Green politics and many of its members did not see it as open for compromise. The party was also punished by its electorate in the next cycle of local elections
Now, you tell me which issues could trigger such cataclysmic events among Republicans or Democrats, and then we can discuss their differences, because everything else is just circumstantial.