Sweden Admits Tapping Citizens' Phones for Decades

paulraps writes "Sweden is close to implementing new surveillance legislation that will include the monitoring of emails, telephone calls and keyword searches using advanced pattern analysis. The objective is to detect 'threats such as terrorism, IT attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction' but the proposals have divided the country. In a misguided attempt to put people at ease, the government admitted that Sweden has been tapping its citizens' phones for decades anyway."

Yes ... and?

The software to encrypt your information is free. If you don't use it you have to assume that people are reading your information...

 

Re:Yes ... and?

The software to encrypt your information is free. If you don't use it you have to assume that people are reading your information...

Yes, but using such software can bring unwanted attention. Especially if the government is looking for stuff like that as I am sure the Swedish government is.

Re:Yes ... and?

Yes! The people of Sweden should have hidden the evidence that they were even making a phone calls! By prearranging a secret means of communication with each and every party they might ever conceivable want to contact! But they didn't! They were asking for it!

Heads up

Well, Phill Zimmerman [philzimmermann.com] not only gave a heads up in 1991, he gave to the tools to use to do something about it. According to even a slow beast as the European Parliament, you should already be encrypting your e-mail [europa.eu]. It's warning is from 2001, read and weep:

29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;

30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;

31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category;

32. Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm;

33. Calls on the Community institutions and the public administrations of the Member States to provide training for their staff and make their staff familiar with new encryption technologies and techniques by means of the necessary practical training and courses;

— from European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI)) [europa.eu]

Re:Yes ... and?

Why encrypt it? Everyone is speaking Swedish -- who can understand THAT anyway?

Re:Yes ... and?

Everyone is speaking Swedish -- who can understand THAT anyway?

Chefs?

Re:Yes ... and?

Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?
See the løveli lakes
The wøndërful telephøne system
And mäni interesting furry animals

Re:Yes ... and?

We apologize for the fault in the comments. Those responsible have been sacked.

Anonymous Møøse

strange

Strange country they got there. On one hand they have the Pirate Bay, wich runs with impunity, on the other this.

Re:strange

c/tabs/your hands/

Re:strange

I can only speak for myself, a Swede who recently turned 26, but to me this is probably the first time I've ever heard the word terrorism and the murder of Olof Palme in the same context. I'd think any awareness of terrorism on my part is totally unrelated to Olof Palme.

--
But what about the awareness of state sponsored terrorism?

Slashdotted

thelocal.se isn't responding. Anybody got a mirror?

Hooray

Cause I'd be sooooooo relaxed if my Government tries to pass a law in favour of torture, but only if they admit they've been doing it for ages.

It's like a 7-mile-wide billboard shouting "SORRY, WE HAVE NO FUCKING SHAME"...

Snicker

Guy : Honey, I think we should start seeing other people
Gal : I can't believe you are saying that, I thought our relationship was strong
Guy : I don't know why you're so upset, I've been seeing others for 10 years now, hasn't bothered you yet
Gal : You've been doing WHAT?!>
Guy : Oh, uh, I mean, well, did I say 10years, I meant .. SMACK

Yeah well...

Yeah, well it's not like Sweden has a document like the US Constitution that prot....ect......s.... its um, citizens from....... Er..... Nevermind.

Revolution!

The US called

The Centre Party leader claims that defence minister Mikael Odenberg's proposed legislation would merely codify practices that have already been in operation for decades

"Sweden has always listened in as a means of ensuring that we have had the information necessary to protect national security. I don't think that is a secret," said Olofsson at a press conference on Friday.

"All I know is that we do not currently have any surveillance on the cable network. For six decades we had a surveillance system with no regulation and absolutely no protection for private individuals. I think that is forgotten sometimes in this discussion," said Odenberg.

The US Federal Government called--it seems that Sweden is infringing on their patent for "Application of the Kansas City Shuffle to a Population of Citizens to Effect Domestic Surveillance Under the Auspices of Preventing Terrorism for the Purpose of Perpetuating Financial Debt"

Too bad..

.. that data mining doesn't work [schneier.com].

Can't reach the site... details?

I can't read the article, so I put this to Slashdotters who can: could this be another bad writeup? I mean, the government could be referring to wiretaps that occurred with valid due-process. I'm not sure about due-process in Sweden, but I'm assuming they have something analogous to warrants there. Or is it good-old US-style warrant-less wiretapping?

Well...

It's not like Sweden is alone. UK + NA have had http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON [wikipedia.org] for quite a while.

Hee hee hee

So all the people who regularly point out how much "better" a society Sweden is than the US, either have to:
- entirely backtrack
- agree that domestic surveillance really ISN'T that big a deal
- just be hypocrites.

(grabs some popcorn)
OK, let's start discussing!

Re:Hee hee hee

Option four: Be just as outraged at the Swedish government's wiretapping.

There's no need for there to be a logical inconsistency.

Re:Hee hee hee

Your post is a logical fallacy. Easy enough to demonstrate that there is at least a fourth option - defining "better" so it includes a wide variety of societial measures, which is what is typically done when one is comparing countries. While I wait for your next post that will provide a comparison of the relative levels of domestic surveillance in Sweden as compared to the United States, I'll provide some of the more traditional metrics that are used to make country comparisons.

                                    Sweden           U.S
Infant mortality rate               2.76/1,000       6.43/1,000
HIV/AIDS - adult prevalence rate   .1%              .6%
Income distribution - Gini index    25               45
Inflation rate                      1.4%             2.5%
Public Debt                         46.4% of GDP     64.7% of GDP
Life expectancy at birth            80.51 years      77.85 years

Source: CIA Factbook

The CIA Factbook isn't a particularly controversial source, and I can think of others ranging from the UNICEF to the UN.

I know it is fun to pretend that people you don't agree with are in a logically inconsistent position. But, it actually reflects poorly on you when you pretend it is the case when it isn't. 

Not Surprised

I live in the UK, and we are the surveillance capital of the world. The fact that phones have been tapped for years in other countries as well doesn't surprise me at all.

With the internet I now have the option of securing my communications if I so wish, which isn't really a problem for surveillance at all for legitimate purposes, but this quite clearly scares the security services here and elsewhere because they want to feel like they're in control. Crucially, the security services in many countries now have to give themselves a reason for being, wasting taxpayers money and continuing the old boy's network - which is where the exagerrated levels of terrorism and foreign threats come from. We've had a ton of these arguments in the UK, and none of them stand up to scrutiny or evidence. Apparently, we're facing threats that are even graver than anything seen in World War 2, and yes there are terrorist groups out there in the world, but this is quite obviously ludicrous to any sane person.

However, I don't think that telling citizens that their phones have been unknowingly tapped for decades anyway, so there's nothing to worry about, is exactly the wisest of moves. These security services organisations are so out of their depth now it isn't even funny, especially regarding internet communications. If they wanted to keep themselves in a job then they should have worked harder to keep Communism and the Soviet Union intact ;-). The fall of the Soviet Union, as it once was, has always puzzled me in that I wonder whether many security services organisations could actually see what was coming.

Not really

FRA [www.fra.se] has always been listening to "international" traffic (radio, satellite etc), not cable/telephone. Most countries do that. Olofsson doesn't really know what she is talking about.

Maybe I've been watching too much 24...

But with the level of organization involved with "large-scale" terror attacks, isn't tapping public lines just more of a minor hassle for them than a trap? When we openly hand this over, IMO - we are 20x more inconvenienced and effected then the terrorists this is supposed to protect us from.

Maybe Sweden had the right idea. Listen in, get information and don't tell us you're doing it. In 10 or 20 years, our lives are going to be exponentially more public then they are now anyway. By the time the dust settles, the paperwork of what is being monitored and what is private is going to be very detailed (and very public). At that point, we built the minefield and flagged it for them.

Bah, they're Swedes.

Everyone knows what they've been saying on the phone: endless variants on "B0rk b0rk b0rk!"

I don't believe this is accurate.

I'm a Swede and judging from the major news sources FRA (Military radio surveillance agency, basically) has only been allowed to monitor radio based sources (primarily the Russians) and not e.g. cable channels. They have certainly not been sanctioned to wiretap phones which is a police matter and requires a warrant. This is what they want to do, but there's been a massive uproar against this, since they say they want to "only" surveill international communications and technically they cannot distinguish between national and international communications (IP-traffic).

In fact, they don't wish to at all guarantee that people who've been wiretapped should know about it afterwards - in other words, this is a very sloppy proposal and they are receiving a lot of critisism for it.

They way they say that "this has been going on for ages and we are now just passing a law for it" is nothing but BS, which purpose is to make the matter seem less drastic.

Most likely, the law will be delayed for a year, debated and more restrictions as to what they may surveill be specified. Expect to see protests here any day soon. :-)

Good thing I don't live there

In my country we have a constitution that protects our rights from invasion by the government. I could say wahtever I wanted to about President Bush and suffer no consequences at all.

I for one would never say anything bad about President Bush though, even though I know the FBI/CIA/Whaterver aren't listening to me. That would just be silly.

I missed the prime post point

If I were here a little earlier, I'd say "cue the apologists" but apparently they've already started...

...which may affect other countries as well

For example 90% of internet traffic from Finland to international destinations goes through Sweden. Which means that Swedes may be able to spy on Finnish traffic as well.

This causes problems because in Finland your mailbox (and of course e-mail traveling to it) is protected by legislation to be your private space. For example your employer has no right to go and look at its contents without your permission even if they own the equipment and the disk space and it contains valuable company information. Of course there are provisions for accessing your e-mail if you happen to be run over by a truck, but in that case the employer has to document when the mailbox was opened, who were present, what was read/removed etc. This applies to e-mail logs to some extent as well.

Sooooo, if you are a company offering e-mail to your employees in Finland but hosting the e-mail servers in Sweden, this Swedish initiative may mean that you are in violation of Finnish laws because outsiders can get access to the mail traffic. The Finnish authorities have taken the view that if this becomes reality, the e-mail servers for Finns need to be moved to Finland.

Long live Nordic co-operation!

The WHAT attacks?

The objective is to detect 'threats such as terrorism, IT attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction'

IT Attacks?

muwahahahahaaaa.......

To make this easier to understand...

poolreps vreetes "Svedee is cluse-a tu implementing noo soorfeeellunce-a legeesleshun thet veell incloode-a zee muneeturing ooff imeeels, telephune-a cells und keyvurd seerches useeng edfunced pettern unelysees. Zee oobjectife-a is tu detect 'threets sooch es terrureesm, IT ettecks oor zee spreed ooff veepuns ooff mess destroocshun' boot zee prupusels hefe-a deefided zee cuoontry. In a meesgooided ettempt tu poot peuple-a et iese-a, zee gufernment edmeetted thet Svedee hes beee teppeeng its ceetizens' phunes fur decedes unyvey."

At least I'll have employment...

I've had one of the more famous professors in data mining directly tell us how stupid it is to try and find "terrorism" in these sorts of data sets. There are too few training data points (actual terrorists) and too much data with a lot of variability. In essence false positives alone would make it all worthless. Now of course some people in the field disagree but those are also usually the ones who stand to make a pretty penny if governments do go this route.

So soon we may no longer have many freedoms but at least I'll have guaranteed employment.

Wiretapping Ubiquitous

I think wiretapping is pretty much done by all police forces, without any restrictions. The whole legal process for getting wiretaps has to do with using information collected during a wiretap as evidence in court. But if the police tap phones and they don't plan to make the evidence collected known outside their small internal group, no one will ever be the wiser. It is like requiring people to have a warrant in order to have oral sex: yeah, good luck enforcing that!

For example, if the police want to determine if person x is engaged in some criminal activity, they don't need a warrant (technically, according to the law they might need a warrant, but not in reality). They just tap the phone line - If they hear via the phone that the person is engaged in some criminal activity, they then claim they recieved "an anonymous tip", get a search warrent, and collect further evidence, and just keep the information collected from the illegal phone tap off the books. If the phone tap doesn't turn anything up, then everyone is none-the-wiser anyway, no big deal.

The only time that a warrant is nessicary, is if you plan on using recordings of phone conversations as evidence. In those cases, then yes they must get a warrant.

Sweden, like every government on the planet, engages in widespread wiretapping. All states are police states, and engage in police state tactics to the extent that they have the resources to do so. The only way to prevent police state tactics is to limit the size and scope of government itself, something that very few people want to do.

Swedish Constitution

Swedish Constitution [riksdagen.se]
2. Fundamental Rights and Freedoms [riksdagen.se]

Art. 6. Every citizen shall be protected in his relations with the public institutions against any physical violation also in cases other than cases under Articles 4 and 5. He shall likewise be protected against body searches, house searches and other such invasions of privacy, against examination of mail or other confidential correspondence, and against eavesdropping and the recording of telephone conversations or other confidential communications.

Since when was Sweden..

.. the target of terrorist attacks or under threat from WMD's?

Who's trying to blow up Sweden?

At the risk of sounding like the cliche ego-centric, globally ignorant American... Is there anybody trying to blow up Sweden? (No, seriously - if there are any Swedes out there who know, please speak up.)

Things are pretty rough if a country that doesn't even suffer from the /illusion/ of terrorist threat* can go to such lengths to violate their people's privacy in the name of security. Makes one think that maybe it's a part of human nature to overreact, or something.

Random statistics from the internet, demonstrating I at least made a half-assed attempt to research this comment: Terrorist "Incidents" in the past 40 years [nationmaster.com]. Sweden is way down at #60, U.S. at #15. Interestingly, per-capita stats [nationmaster.com] place Sweden at the same rank, but the U.S. way down at #93. Of course, this statistic may be entirely meaningless - but I guess it does show something, in terms of the tax base supporting the respective anti-terrorism efforts vs. actual risk.

* - (such as the illusion of threat we have in the U.S. At least people hate us here. Who hates the Swedes? The Finns, I guess... Or the Geats.)

Expectation of privacy

This is another example why when you call overseas there is no expectation of privacy. You can't expect a call from the US to Sweden will go unmonitored, and you damn well better not believe your call to Mohammed Al Muhammed in Iran isn't being listened to by MULTIPLE countries' security agentcies.

Always been Watched

Since the dawn of telecommunications (e.g., the telegraph) governments have been monitoring communications and almost always lying about it. England's invovlment in such scheme's is well documented. Anyone who doesn't assume that their government is watching, is IMHO, maintaining a rather distorted view of how government functions.

That Sweden is admitting this, is really at least a breath of fresh air...
not that it makes the practice any better, at least their can be public debate..

Technologically Possible != Morally Acceptable

Just because something becomes technologically possible (i.e. mass screening of emails) does not suddenly make it ok. No-one would have accepted such things in the days of snail nail. Can you imagine a democratic leader in the 80s explaining why everyone's letters needed to be steamed open and photocopied to counter the threat of the Soviet Union?

You're much more likely to be killed in a violent mugging than by terrorists. Does that mean we should allow mass email screening to identify muggers? Would they be stupid enough to discuss mugging people in emails if they knew everything was being screened? Of course not, and terrorists aren't stupid enough to discuss terrorism either.

Even if it did catch a few terrorists it's not worth giving up your freedoms for anymore that it would be worth giving them up for the possibility of catching a few more violent criminals. It doesn't take much for a democratic system to lurch towards tyranny and it is the height of stupidity to provide the facilities that make it possible.

I bet they don't understand arabic anyway...

so it's just a scheme to get rid of some money acquired via insane taxation...
record, repl^H^H^H^H erase, repeat
surveillance budget spent: check

Re:I bet they don't understand arabic anyway...

Even though you're semi-trollish, it's interesting to note that Arabic is one of the biggest minority languages in Sweden. Many governmental services are even available in Arabic. I'd say we're pretty well set in case we'd need to find Arabic translators - there are tons of them already. Not that there are any real terrorist threats to Sweden, Arabic or otherwise.

not the solution

The search for terrorists have gone way to far, governments all over the world are only helping the terrorists to achieve their goals, to terrify the population. The terrorist problem is not solved by oppressing the people.

Re:Yes ... and?

As long as the stupidest, most ignorant, least knowledgeable and most impressionable among us outweigh the rest and are allowed an equal weight in voting and directing this country, we will never be able to change anything (or preserve the things which are inherently important).

Because everyone knows that grassroots political action has never *cough* desegregation *cough* women's suffrage *cough* changed anything.

Pardon me.

Now ask THIS question. . .

If a federal police organization needs to ask permission to perform a wiretap, (using something like the USA PATRIOT act, for instance), then this assumes that wiretapping is a measure which is controlled by the voting public.

Okay. The problem is that systems like Echelon and similar are working full time and we knew nothing about them until somebody slipped up. And I think it is safe to assume, (and I believe it has been stated), that analogous systems exist in all the major Western nations.

Echelon doesn't come with permission slips. It's functioning full-time, and nobody has been issued a warrant. It's just there. And since federal agencies need permission to spy on the public, then who is using it during all the times when permission slips have not been issued? --Because you don't put a system like that in place and then not use it. If it's there, it's being used all the time. Simple as that. But who is doing the listening? I'd guess it's not the same people who are worrying about obtaining search warrants.

Which means there is a layer of people who don't have to worry about legislation. And if such people can afford giant systems like Echelon, what else can they afford to do? (Well, pretty much whatever they want, if the accounts are to be believed.)

And do they care about 'terrorism'? Sure. But only in how the idea of terrorist can be used as a piece of propaganda to perform social engineering. They would almost certainly know about any terrorist plot well in advance, probably because they engineer or at the very least stage-manage any plot. But to what end?

I think that has been answered in other forums.

The point is that such systems of "Always Listening" show the hand of the Secret Government.

-FL

Re:Shrug

People should not be afraid of their Government; Governments should be afraid of their people.

They Are Afraid

That's why they spy on them.

Re:Grow UP

If a government is prohibited from tapping phone calls originating from their country, then once a terrorist gets into the country, they have carte blanche. It's beyond stupid.

And when a government doesn't need a warrant to tap a phone, then you're well on the road to fascism.

Re:Grow UP

How very ironic you are posting this in a thread about a country that has been chiding the US for its policy on this very issue for years. Always posing as the civilized bastion of liberty looking with disdain on US policy for tracking terrorists, and in many cases harboring known terrorists from extradition.

That's not ironic. Ironic is their making a statement that they've been tapping people's phones all along in an attempt to make people feel better.

But do come back and share your thoughts when the airplanes hit your buildings.

I live in the US, so the airplanes already hit my buildings. And I also live in a country well on its way to fascism. I don't need to live in a utopia to point out the failings of repressive and overreaching governments.

And the simple fact is that if we hadn't been using the Taleban to achieve our goals in Afghanistan, they would never have been in a position to do what they did. In fact they probably never would have ended up deciding that we were the great satan or what have you.

Throughout history, terrorism has tended to occur most when there actually is a wrong that needs righting. I'm not sure whether or not doing wrong is a valid response to doing wrong; frankly I have a hard time making that judgment call because I've never been in their shoes. I've never been part of an organization that was trained and equipped by the US, then abandoned and left to die when we were no longer useful.

Re:Swiss banks Swiss government