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."
Sonera moved their email servers because of this (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently their customers were concerned enough.
Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thi (Score:5, Informative)
According to Finnish law e-mail has very high level of privacy protection.
So in order not to break Finnish law they were practically forced to move the servers to Finland as they could not guarantee e-mail privacy otherwise.
Who did what? (Score:2)
You've got to be a politician, lawyer or a spindoctor for the way you present facts.
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If you seriously think that was about the OOXML then you might want to have your head checked.
Telia-Sonera (Score:2, Informative)
The outage affected key standards sites covering the OOXML problem [groklaw.net]. The outage suddenly lifted hours after the OOXML vote.
The blockage was marketed as an attempt to break net neutrality. However, choosing a network hosting key information sites at a crucial period just prior to an important decision was a bit of cleverness.
Telia-Sonera could have easily routed around the outage, but chose not to. As a result, Telia-Sonera's customers (both business and private) were blocked by actions/inactions b
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Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thi (Score:4, Insightful)
Not entirely accurate (Score:5, Informative)
The Swedish News in English Story on this (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.thelocal.se/12252/20080605/ [thelocal.se]
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Actual sources of news are newspapers like DN (the daily news), Göteborgs-posten, Svenska Dagbladed, Sydsvenskan, Dagens Industri, Metro, City etc most of which are read by as many people as the tabloids.
Its not a swedish idea. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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Sorry. I had to
ECHELON? (Score:5, Interesting)
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They did, noting that the new law would make their already active wiretapping legal.
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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.
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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.
Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly: FRA is _not_ a military organization. It's a civil autority that can be used for several other governmental organizations such as the police, secret police, military or even state owned corporations. But the name is confusing, I grant you that.
One interessting thing is that FRA operates the fifth fastest computer on the Top500 list. Most people believe that is was purchased to meet the need of this new surveillance demand.
It's hardly unknown to the public, even if most are not interessted in such matters. Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.
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?
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I certainly doesn't speak for ALL Swedes but for the sake of argument, I'm speaking for most. I'm quite su
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* CSN (student loans and money)
* FÃrsÃkringskassan (if you are sick, or your children are, or handicapped, or for whatever else reason can't work)
* ArbetsfÃrmedlingen (employment office)
* Socialomsorgen (social security / welfare)
* Skatteverket (tax administration)
Or atleast let them share their journals/databases with each other, which they aren't allowed now unless you give them permission to. This j
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To answer your question, I voted for Obama. He may end up winning, but since that vote didn't put him into government it doesn't invalidate what I said.
If you mean that other Clinton, I was not old enough to vote in 1996.
Even if my record is not 100%, it doesn't change my argument one whit. Even if 100% of the people I vote for make it into office, that still leaves 98 senators and several hundr
Re:Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it. (Score:4, Interesting)
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For one, there is quite a stir in IT related, and mainstream media about this.
Really? If so, you should have no problem pointing to at least one article in mainstream media in recent months.
The current government suggested this while in opposition a couple of years ago
No, they did not. This comes from the MoD via the MoJ under Thomas BodstrÃm, but his lawyers screamed bloody murder so they canned it until it was revived by Odenberg under suspicious circumstances. Read more about it here: http://rickfalkvinge.se/2008/05/30/fra-forslaget-en-tidslinje/ [rickfalkvinge.se]
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This is partly correct and partly bullshit. Swedes usually do have a positive view on turning authority over to the state, that part seems to be true. The reasons for why this is true are very much debatable. Some, like historian Peter Englund, point to the fact that the King often stood with the peasantry against the no
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And the bill doesn't cover just internet, it covers any information going by wire.
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Most people who know what BodstrÃm wants probably dislike him, I know I for sure do, the problem is
It's already up (Score:2, Informative)
The new bill gives them the right to tap into the cables directly, but it also leaves a possibility for them to share their information with other government bodies, and that is the real kicker. So if you write in an e-mail that you drove home drunk yesterday, that could be used against you
Re:It's already up (Score:4, Informative)
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?
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so you believe in a scenario (Score:2)
i'm not talking about government policy here, i'm talking about basic understanding of the technology: don't you think it is rather absurd of you to expect anonymity from a system that is fundamentally nothing but open packets traversing random nodes?
once you accept the notion of the complete lack of anonymity on the internet, why do you expect government policy to suddenly come in, and not only v
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all of which i agree with (Score:2)
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the infrastructure to snoop is not there? (Score:2)
(snicker)
"This copying would also be illegal today"
there's that same fallacy: we need a law to protect us from people who don't obey the law
follow your opinion of the government all the way through: you say it is going to rape your rights, a heinous thing to do. ok, so, we will simply pass a law, and **poof** magically, heinous people will suddenly be virtuous
i'm not saying the government is heinous. i'm not saying the government is virtuous. i'm saying you need to make up your mind. be
you think working with a company (Score:2)
hilarious
so let me get this straight (Score:2)
why do you trust the government to behave so upstanding and forthright on one hand, and then expect nothing from them but fascist harassment... all in the same thought?
fix your impression of the government in one of the two modes you present to me in your statements above:
1. the government obeys the letter of the law all of the time, it is always well-behaved
2. the government wants to
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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
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The government is supposed to work for us. We have every right to be outraged when they instead turn against us.
That doesn't mean that we're surprised.
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encrypt if you don't want it snooped on.
I don't want my private communication snooped on. So, does anyone have experience with what is the easiest and least intrusive way to push email encryption on less technical friends and family? I would prefer something I can install/activate for them which automatically encrypt/decrypt emails to/from me, while still allows them to communicate as usual with others. Preferably an open-standard multi-platform / multi-program solution.
If things really are not this easy, maybe it is time to work hard on develop
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Normally, you have to type in a passphrase to unlock the private key, but I suppose if you're only worried about the security through the wires you needn't use a passphrase.
compounded absurdity (Score:2)
there is no model of the internet where you are wrapped in a magic tcp/ip bubblewrap cloak of protection from government snooping
it's not about the the law. you have a fundamental misunderstanding about your privacy and the technology involved. once you understand how the internet works, you wouldn't expect absurd things like "go ahead and snoop, but just not on me"
wrong (Score:2)
look: the internet is good thing, because it is open. but all good things also have a downside. the downside is that any expectation of privacy is absurd in an environment which, inherent to the technology, has none
and then people compound this absurd expe
Encrypt everything. ALL of it. (Score:4, 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.
More on this from Swedish Pirate Party leader (Score:5, Informative)
More on the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill [rickfalkvinge.se]
Swedish NSA to monitor all phones, Internet [rickfalkvinge.se]
Excerpt from first link:
The bill's name is en anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet [regeringen.se], translating roughly to a better adapted military intelligence gathering. Key points of the bill:
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============
Responses to the bill
How did the bureaucrats respond? In unusually plain language, actually.
The Department of Justice, among other similar comments, simply called the bill "completely alien to our form of government".
The Police Board said that the bill "indicates a frightening lack of understanding for the requirements regarding the protection of citizens' privacy that follow from our Constitution and the European Conventi
Use PGP/GPG for email! (Score:2)
For everything else
Encrypt everything (Score:2)
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."
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"What a brilliant idea, why didn't we start doing that sooner"
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Herein lies the problem. We CAN'T read THEIR mail!.
There is no oversight. We can't watch the watchers.
We are living in an unbalanced surveillance society, where the core system of checks and balances has been thrown out the window.
Puts a new light on email (Score:2)
But I thought (Score:2)
This is to deal with their young Muslim immigrants (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, European governments are just treating the symptoms of the problem rather than the root cause: religious extremism (and some would argue religion generally). The sooner we realise that, the better.
I Miss the Soviet Union (Score:2)
Our governments still did evil. But the threat of being exposed as "as bad as the Soviets" tended to minimize it. Without the Soviet counterexample, our governments are going as wild on us as the Soviets were.
And since
Re:Hate to say this but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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:Potential For Good (Score:5, Interesting)
1 - Get enough nations to start monitoring foreign email and phone calls, claiming it's only for serious national security issues. Ban use for domestic spying or criminal investigation to appease opponents.
2 - Implement international information-sharing agreement for said national-security information. Implement it so well that the various nations are essentially accessing the same system, effectively bypassing the domestic-use ban since another country gathers the information for you.
3 - Grandstanding politicians running for re-election allow access for domestic issues like kiddie porn while screaming "Think of the children!!!"
4 - Greedy politicians bribed to allow access for DRM violations citing made up numbers about lost revenue for a dying recording industry.
5 - ???
6 - World-wide panopticon-enforced fascist dictatorship. The word "privacy" is removed from dictionaries of all languages. George Orwell's ghost stands slack-jawed from the realization that he vastly underestimated the degree of control governments are now able to enforce.
At this point in history I'd like to see an open source email client that automatically uses nsa-grade encryption. Make it dead simple & make it default. Basically this will be necessary to ensure freedom since corporate controlled government has no further use for it.
Welcome to the new milennium!
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6 - World-wide panopticon-enforced fascist dictatorship. The word "privacy" is removed from dictionaries of all languages. George Orwell's ghost stands slack-jawed from the realization that he vastly underestimated the degree of control governments are now able to enforce.
no... he understood that, see "newspeak" [wikipedia.org]
How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinkingâ"not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
a Little more subtle would be Heinlein's take on it in "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Language itself shapes a man's basic ideas.
and the discussion about the lack of a martian word for "War"
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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, ... today. In the end, you will be only free if
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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.
I disagree. All they need to do is put those who USE such tools into jail. Location from those tools got downloaded doesn't matter at all. If such tools are illegal (their use is illegal) YOU will go to to jail - not the one who wrote those tools.
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.
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Re:Hate to say this but... (Score:4, Informative)
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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...
Re:I thought the UK was on the road to 1984... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Deliverator does not approve of meta-verse wiretapping.
Umm... overlords?!
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Hawks likes to lecture about privacy in his books, but has little idea how surveilance and privacy technology actually work. This would be forgivable if the story made up for Hawk's lack of knowledge about the subject matter, but the characters are dreary and the story dragged-out and dull.
Re:But will it pass? (Score:5, Informative)
Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.
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.
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In all other countries it's easy to get thrown out of a party meaning that you have little chance to ever again make an impact on politics. But sometimes this means that you just got "unelected".
So acting all "courageous" wouldn't have done any good.
But the european system doesn't represent the will of the majority so
Re:But will it pass? (Score:5, Interesting)
Some issues are worth getting thrown out of the party come next election for, this is one of them.
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And, should you think that's bad, try going independant in a union election. It gets worse. Much worse.
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Some issues are worth getting thrown out of the party come next election for, this is one of them.
They're politicians.
Certainly in the UK, it's likely to be all they've ever done since leaving university. And they very likely studied something with little practical application in the real world.
The upshot is that what they do versus what they say they'll do may or may not help them get re-elected (probably won't make much odds, voter apathy being what it is). But not towing the party line on a regular basis is a fantastically good way to find yourself thrown out of the party - which in turn is a fant
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.
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But I was talking about the european system. Every party controls "bits" of all powers, law-giving, executive AND judicial in European countries.
So everything in government here gets always expanded, and gets expanded in incoherent directions (because ministers from different parties sabotage eachother with the arm of government they have at their disposal). The army got ordered to expand quite a bit (by a "centrum-right" party), and gets a 20% bud
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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 Ministe
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Um, what now? I know the grass is always greener on the other side, but good god man. Have you not been paying attention?
Federley's Blog (Score:5, Informative)
"Vad som kommer att ske den 17 juni? Ja vem vet. Kan ju bli pÃ¥kÃrd, sjuk, vara pÃ¥ resande fot, bli gravid eller bara vara dÃr och rÃsta ja. Vem vet. Den dagen den sorgen."
Translation:
"What will happen on the 17:th of June? Well, who knows? I might be hit by a car, become ill, spend the day travelling, become pregnant or just be there and vote yes. That day, that sorrow..."
The sad fact of life is that Swedish MP:s serve almost entirely on the whim of their party leadership. If they make trouble, they get wiped off the list in the next election, and they're gone.
Re:But will it pass? (Score:4, Informative)
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Oh, they have been doing that since 1976 (as recently revealed by a recording of FRA's director acknowledging it). This is an attempt to legalize that practice, add a few useless "control stations" and give them even more authority.
Actually they have been doing that since the 1950's. It was revealed in the "IB" scandal [wikipedia.org]. Named so after the secret buerau InformationsByrån that conducted the registrations. It was big news in the late 1970's. At the time, there were lots of Communists in Sweden and the establishment with the Social Democrats in lead was genuinly afraid that they would take over.
So Informationsbyrån was set up in secret and the information retrieved from the register was offensively used to keep the
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According to "Ny Teknik" or whatever page I found it's made up of a cluster of 2128 blade servers from HP.
Theoretical max 182 Tflops, seems like it made second place when compared to the june list / when it was done / news out.
It's number fifth on november 2007 list:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2007/11 [top500.org]
System in question:
http://www.top500.org/system/8819 [top500.org]
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I refuse to to allow such a thing, on principle. If they CAN read my e-mail it doesn't matter if the want to or not, eventually someone will abuse this power and read them anyway.
Re:Enabling provision v. Always will do (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it's draconian to have such a law as long as there are reasonable restrictions on whose transmission even if intercepted is looked into and when they can do that.
It's already possible for the police to obtain a wiretap on anyone's subscriber line if they have a wiretap order from a competent court of law. They don't need any dedicated "wiretapping lines" for that; they can simply order the telco to establish the wiretap and send them the transmissions.
The current proposal, due to be voted on June 17, is not about creating dedicated lines to be used once in a while for transferring individual messages from senders singled out by a wiretap order.
The proposal is about creating dedicated lines to monitor all traffic passing any one of a number of access points 24/7, scanning the contents and metadata of every message for certain patterns (some sources claim there are to be around 250,000 search patterns in simultaneous use, all of them secret of course).
The FRA has claimed there will be no breach of privacy unless a message matches a pattern. This is a confusion of words at best, and a blatant lie at worst. It's like opening every letter handled by the post office, scanning it for an uncommon term like "hexamethyl fluoride", and then claiming only the privacy of messages containing the term "hexamethyl fluoride" has been breached, not the privacy of every other message.
Excuse me, but when anyone accesses my e-mail christmas greeting sent to a friend abroad to verify that I don't use the term "hexamethyl fluoride", my privacy has been breached regardless of whether I have used that term or not. And it doesn't matter a single bit to me that my message is scanned by a computer rather than a human, when I haven't the faintest idea of what that computer is looking for. Saying I'm unlikely to send a matching message doesn't resolve my complaint. I'm unlikely to be killed during a bank robbery too; that doesn't mean I will approve of making it legal for bank robbers to fire a gun at me.
When mass wiretapping is legalized and the physical infrastructure is implemented, there is nothing to stop this from being abused way beyond the original intentions, and the original intentions are unclear enough as it is. A committee of humans will oversee the world's fifth largest computer cluster scanning billions of messages every day for items matching a quarter of a million patterns, to make sure noone's privacy is being invaded without sufficient cause?
It's like watching a golf course from the club house during a thunderstorm to make sure the grass doesn't get wet.
And it's not like this 24/7 mass wiretapping programme is some unverified conspiracy theory. The technique to be used is described in the proposal [regeringen.se] itself, in the Proposed act on signals monitoring for military intelligence purposes ("Förslag till lag om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet", pages 9-11), Article 3.
The good thing about this is that more people will become aware of the surveillance, whether it's legal or not, and hopefully begin defending their own privacy with the help of encryption and other means. It's a pity that it has become necessary, though.
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Phone spies: Town halls using anti-terror powers to bug residents' calls and emails [dailymail.co.uk]
Town hall snoopers used controversial anti-terror powers to delve into the phone and email records of thousands of people last year.
They wanted to check for evidence of dog smuggling and storing petrol without permission - and even to trace a suspected bogus faith healer.
In one case they were inquiring into unburied animal carcasses.
Some councils are allowing middle-ranking staff to authorise co