In Finland, Nokia May Get Its Own Snooping Law 284
notany writes "Nokia may be too big a company for Finland (a country of 5 million people). It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will. After Nokia was caught red-handed, twice, snooping on its employees (first 2000-2001, second 2005), the company started a relentless lobbying and pressure campaign against politicians to push what the press has been calling 'Lex Nokia' or the 'snooping law.' This proposed law would allow employers to investigate the log data of employees' e-mails, legalizing the kind of snooping that Nokia had engaged in. Parliament's Constitutional Law Committee asked the opinions of eight legal experts, and all opined that the proposed law is unconstitutional. The committee ignored all the advice and declared the proposal constitutional." An anonymous reader adds a link to an AFP story reporting that Nokia has threatened to pull out of Finland unless the law passes.
Re:In soviet union (Score:5, Informative)
Not just Nokia or employers in general (Score:5, Informative)
While the right for employee to monitor your net usage while you are using employer's systems is up for debate, this bill is much worse.
The bill doesn't mention e-mail, or workplace.
It only contains words of "community subscriber" and "identifying information, but not content".
So, universities and schools can monitor what students do on the Internet. Over any protocol, not just e-mail. Who do they call on VoIP. What websites they visit. Same applies for libraries. Or even community housing.
To Clarify (Score:4, Informative)
Currently, in Finland, it is illegal to monitor emails of employees who are using company equipment and the company network. This is, of course, completely absurd.
All Nokia wants is the ability to see the the following information: Sender, Receiver, Size and Type of Attachments, and Date/Time. They don't even want to read the contents.
They have a reason to believe that an employee used their own email system to sell their IP.
Does anyone here really think you could run a large company without being able to monitor emails sent by company representatives, using company resources? Does this really seem right to you?
Re:In a true constitutional republic (Score:1, Informative)
What if the VP of lobbying is ex prime minister? In Nokia it is so.
Re:To Clarify (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Boycott (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Holly Crap Fist Post (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with work mail is that we are quite heavy unionized here in Finland (even in IT sector which - I've heard - isn't as unionized on the other side of the Ocean). The union's representatives have full right and reason to use their work address to communicate with other employees regarding business with the union.
Employers should really not be allowed to snoop on this. Same goes for other info that you are allowed to use your work mail to but the employer shouldn't be allowed to read. For example, I (like a lot of Finns. We have decent universal healthcare but many employers make deals with private firms too) have healhcare paid by work. I don't think that still means I am not allowed to have confidentiality with my problem. And if I'm not, that should have been in the contract originally.
Re:In soviet union (Score:3, Informative)
Do read up on finlandization, then. It's what we have now towards the US, the EU and NATO instead of what we used to have after the war and until 1991, when it was with regard to the USSR. Most everyone fucking hates that our so-called elected leaders are entirely spineless towards power of any kind.
We do have a bit of national pride with regard to the winter war. It's mostly misplaced: the main reason why that war went so well was that Stalin set the invasion up as a PR operation first and foremost. His troops had no supplies, no supply lines, not even proper winter wear. And yet they managed to conquer significant areas of land, which for some reason is billed as a "defensive victory".
The finnish army subsequently went on, encouraged by the "victory", to get their arses kicked alongside the foremost military might of the time, Nazi Germany. The Soviets were the ones doing the kicking, unsurprisingly.
Re:Boycott (Score:4, Informative)
My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked.
You are not a frequent reader? In the last few weeks, Nokia put Qt out under LGPL. The good karma earned through that action alone should be enough for us to ignore strongarm political tactics (and small PR disasters) for a while.
Word about the newspaper. (Score:1, Informative)
I tried to write a comment on what's wrong and at least very deceptive in this news piece - but I quickly figured out that would have been too much work. Just keep in mind that Helsingin Sanomat has basically monopoly position regarding national "quality" newspapers in Finland. It's just the only one left, and has been enjoying this situation for almost two decades now.
It has its own very strong agenda even if it claims to be unbiased, and often I find it hard to believe the journalists have any journalistic dignity left or even believe in being actual journalists. They have several topics they twist heavily only because they have chosen such a line; anti-Nokia line is one of those. Other is to openly attack against non-consensus citizen opinions, especially in the great evil that challenges their own monopoly - the Internet. HS very avidly supports effective (if not legally obvious) reductions of freedom of speech and opinion anonymity. "For better quality public debate", of course.
They are one of the Finnish strongholds of journalists that have received traditionally ultraleftist education and see that their purpose is to produce ideologically accepted news instead of bringing out the facts to the people. It wouldn't be such a problem if the country actually had another national newspaper, especially one with differing opinions to return them in line - but no, there isn't one.
No, I don't think Nokia is a pure saint - but I think HS may even want this legislative change while trying to put the blame to Nokia, and not the leftist government bureaucrats that get pages and pages of newspaper praising from their same-minded "journalists."
Re:you mean there are places that DO respect priva (Score:5, Informative)
Well, the Finland has nowadays one of most stricts privacy laws. What Nokia wants to do, is the thing US companies do routinely every day claiming that they has to do it to protect shareholder value.
The law at present proposed form is nowhere close to laws (if one exist) in many "civilized" countries, not to talk about totalitarian countries. Like one not-so-democratic east of Finland, and one we-listen-your-communication west of Finland.
It is actually quite funny, that the existing law is known as "Lex Sonera" (Sonera was a former state-own telco now part of TeliaSonera). The former CEO of Sonera wanted to find out which employees leaked information to press by getting call records of many people (board members, other employees and journalists). This obviously backfired and we got one of most strict implementations of EU privacy laws.
Now Nokia with other companies wants to get some of those rights back (earlier the law was unclear for computer communications, but the right of privacy existed there) they unofficially had before that. Of course, we as citizens and employees do not want to give that away. Even if I need to do extra tricks when I do my work to keep user data private.
I personally like very much that Finnish law tries to protect employees: often the situation in working life is quite uneven and the employer has upper hand in many cases. Laws put some limits on that, even if cannot protect in all cases.
Re:Holly Crap Fist Post (Score:4, Informative)
Um, why is that? Here in the US, unions generally cannot use employer resources to conduct union business. That makes sense, and obviates the privacy concerns anyone might have. Is it really that hard to register a Gmail account?
It's pretty ludicrous that in Finland you can just take confidential company information and use your work email to send it to a competitor. Not only is your company not allowed to look at the content of the emails you send, but they cannot even investigate WHO IT WAS SENT TO. This makes sense how?
Re:The Lesson Is... (Score:3, Informative)
Well, a town whose economy consists entirely of selling household goods is very much overdue for an economic collapse. By this logic, we should ban computers to keep the typewriter companies in business. Hell, Wal-mart generally pays a lot better than small locally-owned retailers in small towns. A lot of those places employ illegals, or work off the books and don't pay taxes.
I mean, sure, you might enjoy buying your groceries from some shady hole-in-the-wall outfit that charges outrageous prices. But most people don't.
Re:Boycott (Score:2, Informative)
Boycott? BS.
I'm Finnish and big on privacy, but the /. article about this is just FUD.
Essentially, the law says "the corporation has the right to monitor what employees do with corporation resources". Frankly, in most countries that's given.
And to boot, it's completely unconfirmed that any threatening happened - everyone officially denies it.
Re:This is sensationalist news (Score:2, Informative)
I live in Finland and don't work for Nokia, and am very sensitive about my privacy.
And this is pure FUD. It's just a rumor, and everyone related says there's been no threats when questioned.
And to make it worse, the law's only really bad side-effect isn't even mentioned - that it allows EVERY community internet provider to snoop on communications.
Which could easily be fixed by forcing people to sign contracts explicitly acknowledging that it's happening.
Not a contribution to the Free Software community (Score:4, Informative)
Besides your astonishing lack of perspective, putting Qt under the LGPL was not a contribution to the free software community at all, hence not a consideration. It was already free software.
They just want proprietary companies to develop for their toolkit, presumably in great part because of their plans to leverage it on the Symbian platform as well.
Don't get me wrong, the LGPLing is all fine and okay, it's just not very consequential as far as liberty goes, and that is the axis which we're talking about with this law.
Re:Holly Crap Fist Post (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, as in the US, $MultinationalCorp will get its way.
We're told that we should be lucky that we're even employed. We're told that we should just STFU and GBTW.
There is no real sense of loyalty to company or vice-versa anymore.
Re:Word about the newspaper. (Score:4, Informative)
You conveniently left out the fact that a number of law professors were asked for their expert opinion, and they unanimously said that the bill was unconstitutional. This expert opinion was then ignored by the politicians preparing the law.
This is not entirely unlike what happened with the copyright law (the so-called Lex Karpela) a few years back.
More than the leftist government bureaucrats, I'm worried about the right-wing politicians that are doing whatever their big-business masters want with total disregard to both public and expert opinion, the constitution and the principles of a democratic state.
-A Finnish AC