Swedish Pirate Party Launches ISP 356
WillDraven writes "Torrentfreak is reporting that the Swedish Pirate Party has launched an ISP. Starting with 100 residents in a housing organization in the city of Lund, Pirate ISP hopes to gain 5% of the market in Lund before spreading to other markets. Headed by longtime Pirate Party member Gustav Nipe (video interview in English), the company aims to provide Internet service with the sort of guarantees one would expect from the Pirate Party. Most notable are the promises to keep no logs of subscriber activity and thus to provide no data to law enforcement or private corporations."
Which is awesome until... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
But isn't it better to trust people with freedom than to treat everyone like criminals?
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
... people start using it for child pornography transfer and other things that SHOULD be illegal.
This is precisely why these things shouldn't be illegal. At least, possession and transfer of information (including child pornography) shouldn't be illegal. (Of course, abusing children to make child pornography should be illegal, and child pornography itself could very well be evidence of a crime.) The problem is, as soon as you make certain kinds of information illegal, then it would be impossible for ISPs to provide the kind of anonymity many of us would desire. Child pornography makes a wonderful excuse to impose strict data retention laws that affect a wide variety of users.
Kind of Sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:1, Insightful)
The police will then be able to wiretap the perps, just like they would otherwise.
ISP logs have never been used in Swedish court as evidence of child porn transfer. The possession of the images themselves are the most serious crime, and the intent or actual transferring to others.
In other words, the lack of ISP logs will not make it significantly harder to bring REAL criminals to justice.
However, It will make it more difficult for movie companies to perform large-scale 20,000 people civil lawsuits.
Re:I predict... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
Downloading child pornography is a major crime?
It's better to let a guilty man go free than convict an innocent.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you're trolling or trying to be funny but that's just fucking scary.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a false dichotomy. You can be allowed freedom to speak while still being able to be found when you use that freedom to engage in criminal activities or to organize acts of terrorist destruction.
Re:IBTL (Score:3, Insightful)
how would you feel if i was able to call up and get your IP from this post - then call your ISP and get your address, along with usage logs so i can approximate when you will be home.
then i'll just go sit on your door step and say hi and talk to your neighbors that i'm just watching you for suspicious activity because you where online talking about keywords "child pornography & terrorism"
now - does it make a difference if i'm wearing a uniform or not?
what if i was a politician and you happened to say something negative about my campaign?
the point is - that we need an avenue for free speech - we need an avenue to be able to anonymous. do people abuse that? yes they do - should we penalize all of society to a nanny/police state for the few? NO..
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can be found and punished for that then you can be found and punished when you want to speak out against your government, when you want to say unpopular things, support unpopular positions or organize acts of civil protest.
Re:IBTL (Score:5, Insightful)
"... this age of terrorism and child pornography ..."
What the hell? You think this age is "different" some how?
Terrorism is certainly not rampant. Look back a few decades, to say, the fifties or the sixties when there were riots all over the USA.
Child Pornography, hell. Look back a century, "children" were getting married to middle-aged men and having their babies. The only difference is, back then nobody arrested you for it, or even thought twice about it.
"This age" is noted only for everybody being declared a criminal and living in fear that their government is going to lock them up if they happen to say something ... like, say, this post on SlashDot RIGHT HERE.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to make analogies, do it right. There is no "just in case" recording of everything I do in my home so that cops can get a warrant and watch what I did. Even for "live" investigations, there's a high legal barrier before a cop can enter my home. If someone just accuses me of stealing something, it is not sufficient for a warrant. On the internet, with most ISPs, not only is there a record which ties my online activities to my identity, there's also almost no barrier if someone wants to access that information.
Re:I predict... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah but that does not really stop the **AA's does it?
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
logging every site that every user visits through an ISP just in case law enforcement want to check up on it later to see if they're viewing illegal material is like putting a camera in every bedroom just in case law enforcement want to check up on it later to see if you've been raping victims in the room.
an equivalent to a warrant to search your house would be a warrant to search your computer not having your ISP recording everything you view for future inspection.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IBTL (Score:3, Insightful)
the health and physical well-being of my family and neighborhood
Let me put you and your family in a prison I design and I'd be almost certain that your health and physical well-being will be ensured. I'm not sure you'd enjoy it much, though.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, piracy should be illegal too. Do you think you shouldn't have to pay content creators? How does that work logically? Are you just entitled to their stuff for free or something?
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:5, Insightful)
"for the purpose of illegal activities"
Why would you assume this?
Believe it or not, there are people in this world who are just as law-abiding as you may be, but who don't want our every action cataloged by those in government.
There is no reason that anybody needs to know where I am, when I'm asleep, or when I poop, despite what the people pushing for National Healthcare might think (when you poop could be important, if you're constipated it'll cost us all more money to pay for your healthcare).
"for the purpose of privacy"
IS NOT
"for the purpose of illegal activity"
No matter what those in power would rather you believe.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:3, Insightful)
in that situation I'd agree with you and I'd have a hard time seeing how they'd be able to refuse to keep records in the case of an official warrant asking them to keep logs on one of their customers.
What I oppose is the kind of general fishing expeditions that law enforcement seem to love- log every users actions then hand over anything and everything after a polite email from the police(without a warrent) so the police can snoop through the private lives of innocent people in the hope of finding a crime.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not going to make assumptions about how long you've been on the internet and what not, but in case you weren't here in the early days, an open and free network is what it was. The sad fact is is that there are enough people who abused the system such that what you have today is the end result.
Re:IBTL (Score:2, Insightful)
in this age of terrorism and child pornography
You say that as though terrorism was something even slightly new (it isn't, and has been going on for centuries, if not millennia), and as though child pornography is anything more than child abuse (which isn't even limited to our species it goes so far back) with a camera.
Should we go after Kodak for making child porn possible, or after Polaroid for making it easy to anonymise?
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:2, Insightful)
The logs they are speaking of is rather who customer got which IP lease for which date and time. Without those it's just an IP with no-one to charge. With them they got a real person.
until that IP address is witnessed logging in to a facebook account or checking an email address or the 1000s of other ways traffic can be analyzed to pair requests up with real people.
Idiots! (Score:4, Insightful)
The stupid pirate party and the stupid Swedish government have just handed a huge propaganda victory to the RIAA. Within a week the entire swedish economy will have ground to a halt and terrorists will be overrunning sweden and building WMDs! Then the RIAA will say "We told you so! Look what happens when ordinary people are allowed freedom!"
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that'll be small potatoes compared to the fact that every black hat, spammer, script kiddie, phisherman, fraudster, terrorist, and mobster can safely do whatevery they want and not have to worry about it.
You know what? I say good. Just like how the government needs a warrant to tap your phone, it's absurd to think it's ok for them to monitor everything everyone does on the internet. The government has no authority to stop people from having private conversations in person or on the phone, the internet shouldn't be any different.
This is just like how each time a new form of media comes out, the MPAA / RIAA try to sue for using it for "piracy" - just because the internet is a "new" form of communication, they want to ignore laws against spying on people.
Freedom doesn't just apply when you want it to apply.
Re:IBTL (Score:5, Insightful)
Child Pornography, hell. Look back a century, "children" were getting married to middle-aged men and having their babies. The only difference is, back then nobody arrested you for it, or even thought twice about it.
I know, that always kills me. People try to say that they're "kids", yet not that long ago they would be married at that age. Hell, people try to talk down on teenagers and say that they're stupid and such, but it's only because society changed to make them less responsible. 100 years ago many of those high schoolers would have had a job and a family already. That's how things were for thousands of years, then all of the sudden society goes batshit crazy and decides that anyone under 30 is incompetent and needs the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.
I'm all for punishing people who intentionally harm others. However, I'm not for having blanket rules because a few old people who had crappy lives decide that they know better than everyone else.
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, I would buy a used car from one of them before I bought one from a politician. Well, maybe a used boat. Seeing that they're pirates and all.
Re:IBTL (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that much, actually. The apprentice system tended to keep teens under their master's thumbs.
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:5, Insightful)
Defending the legalization of private sharing is legitimate (as any other speech, as in Free Speech), and it's their main platform. They don't need to "cover it" using other stuff - they call themselves the "Pirate Party", for crying out loud, do you really think they're trying to hide their motives?
Privacy is just another of their position, it's not a cover up for anything, because they obviously aren't trying to cover up their main motive.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:3, Insightful)
Now imagine there is a security vulnerability allowing the interception of such a communication. Accordingly, those responsible might patch that vulnerability, but you, as the user, are negligent and fail to install that patch. If that intercepted communication is subsequently used to prosecute you, it is partly your fault.
p.No, it's not. It's called "inadmissible evidence". Just like how the police can't use a phone call against you in court without a legal warrant to listen to your calls, they should be required under the same anti-wiretapping laws to have a warrant to monitor your internet activity. The only reason that this isn't the norm (applying wiretapping laws to the internet) is because corrupt government officials realize that it's their chance to get away from the restrictions of wiretapping laws.
Re:IBTL (Score:3, Insightful)
And really, in this age of terrorism and child pornography is it even a good idea to have an anonymous isp?
Yes, in this age of very real abuse of our rights in freedoms for the sake of fighting largely imaginary and/or irrelevant threats such as terrrorism and child pornography, it is an extremely good idea to have an anonymous ISP.
Oh yes, the promise to pay for a one-way ticket to North Korea applies to you as well, and I'm dead serious here: you get your Big Brother wet dream come true (with minor inconveniences such as a mostly-grass diet, but it's a small price for safety, isn't it?), and we get one less person who is eager to vote away his and others' freedoms that make up the cornerstone of the modern Western society.
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Kind of Sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole argument that "only criminals require privacy" is really getting tired.
They offer privacy and anonymity (as the latter can't exist without the former), and there's nothing wrong with aspiring for the two.
People breaking the law, while unfortunate and wrong, is a lesser evil - a necessary sacrifice for a greater good.
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt the FRA will answer any requests....
the issue isn't "will they?", it's "can they?" and "should they?". if the answers are respectively YES, NO, then why aren't they NO, NO.
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to forgive the GP. He/she is a product of the Western school systems and media which are more interested in producing obedient consumers than citizens.
Obedience to the authorities and blind belief in the law are all hammered into people from the tenderest of ages and constantly reinforced by the media (consider how many TV series are about the "hero-like-cops enforcing the law" vs "hero-like-rebels challenging the law").
Some of us, when we get to adulthood become aware of how dirty and corrupt the process of making laws is and how many laws out there serve purposes which are in fact "prop-up the business model of my buddies" and against the best interests of society.
Some of the great heroes of our times (like Ghandi) actually broke the law again and again and in fact, in his time, grand figures of the US history like Washington and his co-revolutionaries where busy breaking the laws of the crown.
Blindly following unfair laws is the way of the Sheep, not of Man.
Re:Please spread to other countries... (Score:3, Insightful)
And what if one thinks (as I do) that noncommercial copying and distribution of data should be legal? I should just STFU? Sorry, but I won't. I won't STFU about wanting drugs, prostitution, and gambling legalized, either. Noncommercial copying and distribution doesn't harm anyone, and study after study has show this.
As to drugs, prostitution, and gambling, how I piss my money away is none of anybody's business but my own.
Re:Which is awesome until... (Score:3, Insightful)
A better analogy -- some people object to alcohol, while beer is one of my favorite pleasures. I say if you don't like alcohol, don't drink it. But that didn't stop people from getting a Constitutional amendment making it illegal (and turning my grandfather into an underground criminal, since he had a beer making kit in his barn).
But I think you misunderstood the GP. He asked "what is wrong with having morals?" and the answer is nothing, until you try to make others follow YOUR morals. And he's right that there is no correlation betweeen moral and legal; there's nothing immoral about smoking pot, but most people would consider adultery to be immoral, even though it's perfectly legal in Illinois and most other places.