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.
you mean there are places that DO respect privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
wait. I'm confused.
there is still a country on earth that has SOME kind of privacy laws that protect individuals from those in greater power (employers, government, etc)?
the heck with nokia leaving finland. I want to MOVE THERE!
In the name of anthopomorphism (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search. Compared with the USA under King George and Prince Chaney, any country with "laws blocking companies from monitoring employee emails" sounds like a privacy paradise.
I know we're all for humanizing these collective fictions called corporations. Even going so far as to equate them to real people in law.
Now, let's be realistic: someone inside Nokia decided that they personally wanted this law. I guess it's nice to have none of the responsibility for your actions yet the power to have them executed. Some single manager held a meeting and told people to do this, even though it is the whole company that will be judged based on this.
While the employees are paid to be tools of the company, it is a single, living an breathing idiot somewhere inside Nokia that wants to play voyeur. Who? Unless it's a VP or CO level person, we may never know. All we know is that someone might be trying to stop the flow of confidential information out of the company.
Re:The Lesson Is... (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that the employees can quit and get other jobs and the customers can buy other products.
Absolutely! Would you like Exxon gas or Mobile gas for your car? What kind of Microsoft computer do you want to use at work? Would you prefer AT&T spying on your, or Comcast?
How about working freelance or starting your own business? Just make sure you don't ever do anything that a large corporation doesn't want you to do, or you will be held [1]personally liable! Also, don't get sick, because you won't have any health care! Who cares that our great leader, Big Brother, isn't held up to these standards? After all, he did such a great job last year, we personally gave him a 16.9 billion dollar bonus! I know that was the best $100 of my tax money I ever spent!
[1]http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/30/2032236
Really sad.. (Score:3, Interesting)
For years I've felt bad for, well for example Americans for corporations having way too much power over there. Now even at my very own home country, the employer of my many friends of mine pulls shit like this, it's unbelievable.
For what? To spy their employees? What the fuck?!
Does Nokia even have the slightest competitive edge on innovation at any frontier? No it does not. In the past few years they've only managed to start copying others.. So I guess they are afraid their employees sending emails telling everyone that they are now starting to copy Apple or RIM or whoever employs innovative people. That's like sending answers to simple math questions like 1+1=2.
The law itself, so called "Lex Nokia" is bad, it's really bad. Any organization can, after it's passed start surveillance on their employees after filing some stupid form. Police won't have any control over these operations. You aren't even required to fill the god damn form, you can do it later on and pay a small fine!
Can you spell out obscene in some other way? This is ridiculous. I do not want to live here anymore if Nokia gets it's way. To hell with them, Finland would be a much better place without them. Poor, maybe a bit shaken but it surely isn't worth of losing every last sense of law in this country.
Just if someone would make sure to collect them every cent of development grants they've received in the past years before they go.
Re:In soviet union (Score:5, Interesting)
The ongoing joke was that SF really stood for Soviet Finland due to our somewhat submissive relationship with the USSR.
Anyone calling the Finns "submissive" towards the USSR has never bothered to read a history book. If the Finns were submissive, Finland wouldn't even exist as a country today. The Finns stood up to Stalin [wikipedia.org] and resisted his aggressive designs -- they managed to stalemate the Soviets for more than three months even though they were outnumbered 4 to 1 (in men, the disparity in tanks/aircraft/artillery was even worse) and kept their sovereignty.
Here's a tidbit for anyone that tells you the Finns were submissive: Of the European nations involved in WW2 only three managed to survive the war without having their capital occupied by the enemy: the UK, the Soviet Union and Finland.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, it seems unlikely that, even if this is all true, the security policies of these departments would be tight enough to keep a determined spy from getting information out, but I guess in theory this could explain how the law would be of use in preventing industrial espionage.
blacklist=Nokia++ (Score:3, Interesting)
Lemma see now...
1) I pulled out all of my CISCO gear when I first started working at a local logistics supplier, that was chuck FULL of CISCO. When my boss asked me WHAT WAS I DOING? I simply said, "Well, we have all of these old computers and they can act as gateways, vpn routers, and VoIP servers for our desktops. Why upgrade to equipment we cannot reuse in the budget for other things, or easily fix just by loading BSD or Linux on it?"
But it was all a lie of course...OR
Was it?
I replaced all of the CISCO gear because CISCO, was providing the Chinese government the means to kill and torture anyone they do not like online.
I kept that part to myself as my Boss loves CISCO. He likes to keep his job more though, so he left me do it.
I still buy from Linksys because I need WRT54GL's, which I load with that awesome DD-WRT firmware.
If anyone can recommend a better device I can buy from a company that doesn't help foreign governments hunt down citizens on the internet, that would be great. WRT54GL though is a pretty nice piece of hardware.
CISCO, you suck.
2) Novell. Oh, well...what can I say? Back in the day when I was a Novell administrator, I thought Netware 5 was going to be better and provide a protected mode OS you can run apps on. Nope, I was betrayed. I thought Novell was going to get a nice protected memory architecture and they promised it would, so it would run better, with less ABENDS at 4AM in the morning. They never did deliver any of those promises. Sigh.
I get cranky thinking about the early morning trips into the office, sorry.
But the whole buying of SuSe, getting money above and below the table from a unknown source, eventually, to find out it was Microsoft was the straw that broke the GNU Oxen's back.
So, I ripped out all of my Novell servers, pulled out all of my SuSe servers, and well, my boss was a problem. He liked the SuSe desktop. A couple of days later his workstation wouldn't boot. (I wonder how that happened?)
So, installed Fedora, and he loved it. I said "You know, Fedora is much more stable. We should install Fedora on all of our desktops and servers where we can and get rid of SuSe so you do not crash again." :-)
Called SuSe to tell them, "Tell Bill I said Hi the next time you give him a in the back room. Oh, and one more thing, YAST SUCKS."
Then there is the whole Icaza thing...with the .Net crap SuSe loads on the boxes. .Net is crap in the Microsoft world, so NOW Miguel gets the brilliant idea to make CRAP PORTABLE, and open up a distro such as SuSe to patent litigation!
Yeah, Novell...
YOU SUCK...
IT.
3) Now...SIGH. Nokia. Is it not bad enough, we have politicians who are stupid and remove more and more of our rights on a daily basis? No, you say? You say you want to speed that process up and sovereign governments where you do business are annoying?
That is really too, bad, Nokia.
Tomorrow, it just so happens, I will be calling our cellular carrier and complaining about the reception of these Nokia phones we currently use. (Not really, they work fine. It just begins the process I need to get rid of them out of the organization at all 20 locations in Wisconsin.)
But, make no doubt, after I sabotage, and kill these phones, we will be buying different ones at the end of our contract this May.
Does it always have to end this way?
Nokia. You SUCK.
-Hack
Re:In soviet union (Score:5, Interesting)
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"
Well, like most Russian "victories" they were successful by drowning their opponent in Russian blood. The Russians took nearly half a million casualties to conquer 9% of a country that wasn't even a 50th of the size of the Soviet Union. One Russian general was quoted as saying "We've won just enough ground to bury our dead"
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.
I don't know how you can say you got your asses kicked when you were the only non-western country to come out of the war with your sovereignty intact. You did better than the Baltic States, Poles or even the Germans. Have some national pride and don't be so dismissive of your accomplishments. You held onto your sovereignty against the most ruthless power of the day with little outside support despite overwhelming odds.
I'd love to get to come to Finland some day and see some of the memorials and museums related to the Winter and Continuation Wars. Where would you suggest I go?
No-competes are enforceable (Score:1, Interesting)
I still prefer California's right-to-work stance. No-competes are standard items in Finnish employment contracts (up to 6 months).
Re:No-competes are enforceable (Score:2, Interesting)
Finland has unemployment benefits to counter that though.
Re:In soviet union (Score:4, Interesting)
The Finns stood up to Stalin and resisted his aggressive designs -- they managed to stalemate the Soviets for more than three months even though they were outnumbered 4 to 1 (in men, the disparity in tanks/aircraft/artillery was even worse) and kept their sovereignty.
A simple, yet effective presentation. [photobucket.com]
Re:The Lesson Is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:In soviet union (Score:2, Interesting)