FRA Issues

The proposed law of allowing the Swedish national defence radio establishment FRA to scan any internet traffic leaving Sweden has brought up a lot of protests. Today hundreds gathered outside the riksdag in protest against it.

Although I am worried, I have strong hopes in that the European court of human rights will overthrow the law in the end, as it constitutes massive surveillance of all citizens without discrimination. That is, having wire taps on certain internet connections (i.e. all traffic to and from a specific end point IP address) might be reasonable for the police in order to fight crime; but what the law will introduce is generic deep packet inspection and searching for keywords in all traffic bound to a non swedish destination (for example gmail, hotmail or any other site outside the state). Note that interior traffic is in many cases routed past the borders due to the nature of the internet, so spying on foreign traffic only is impossible to guarantee technically.

Also, monitoring the traffic into other EU states would be spying on their allies and neighbours. The European integration has bound the states and citizens of Europe together, and more and more Europeans are moving to other states, so the deep packet scans will even if they can be guaranteed to only target foreign traffic automatically pick up traffic between thousands of Swedes (100k living in the UK for example), which was not the purpose of the law.

I will not rehash everything here as so many other bloggers have done that already, but the fact that the law proposal which is inherently unconstitutional and not compliant with European law has made it so far suggests that there are problems in the Swedish law making process.

Firstly, I would say that it is now more important than ever before that a constitutional court is established with the role to try law proposals on their compliancy with the Swedish constitution and European law.

The second item that is of interest is that the parliamentarians that have suggested that they oppose the law is more afraid of the party whip than of the people that have elected them. The entire affair has lead me to see the advantage of a majority based system such as the one in the UK. Not that I like that kind of system in general since it result in a massive misrepresentation in the parliament in the UK. What Sweden need now, is a federal constitution that introduce a bicameral parliament. On chamber would then have proportional representation, and then the second would be a majority elected senate and thus directly responsible to the people. Such a senator would be possible to discharge at any time following a vote of no confidence in the district the person was elected in.

As a side note, despite that the current government is doing a great job in general, I would be happy to see it fall because of this.

Ahhhhhrg!!!

Jag blir mer och mer rädd, vart är vi på väg?

Försvarsministern introducerade just ett förslag som skall ge FRA rätt att övervaka ALL kabeltrafik som går ut från Sverige. Det innebär varenda webbsida du läser (förutom de i Sverige), varenda e-brev du skickar ner till fastlandet med mera. Och om du har e-postservern utanför Sverige, gäller detta även all e-post du skickar inom sverige, eftersom denna kommer gå i kabel över statsgränsen.

Det värsta är dock Oldsbergs newspeek inspirerande uttalande: "Ett viktigt steg för att förbättra skyddet för den enskildes integritet i vårt land."

Staten deklarerar därmed att "två plus två bir fem", men det blir inte sannare för det....

At SvD.se we can read about the Iman Latifov's statement on the caricatures:

Latifov anklagade Jyllands-Posten för att ha grovt missbrukat yttrandefriheten och brutit mot Genèvekonventionen genom att hetsa mot religiösa grupper. Han krävde en "ärlig och sann ursäkt" av danske statsministern Anders Fogh Rasmussen och Jyllands-Postens chefredaktör Carsten Juste.

Roughly translated this mean:


Latifov accused the Jyllands-Post for gravely abusing freedom of speech and violating the Geneva convention through hate speech against religious groups. He demanded a "honest and truthful excuse" by the Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the Jyllands-Post's editor Carsten Juste.


What? The Geneva convention deals with the treatment of POWs, wounded soldiers and sailors and civilians during a time of war and armed conflict.

Am I the only one confused here?

France Soir Editor Fired

The editor of France Soir has been fired by the Egyptian owners of the news paper. The editor's offence was to publish the Jylland-Post caricatures of Mohammad. The France Soir also published their own caricature on the front page, where Budah, the Jewish God, the Christian God and Mohammad are sitting together on a cloud.

The headline states that "Yes, we have the right to caricaturise God". And considering how many men and women who burned at the stakes for this right, attempts to silence news papers like this is a sign of enourmous disrespect for the dead.

Comment on the Arab Reaction on European Caricatures

On BBC we can read that:
Ministers from 17 Arab countries on Tuesday urged Denmark's government to punish Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the caricatures, for what they described as an "offence to Islam".

Well, let me tell you, you wise seventeen (probably unelected) leaders. Your demand that the Danish goverment punish the people whom you do not agree with, and whose opinions you despise, are an offence against liberty, democracy and the free word.

I have two demands:

• I demand at once that you punish yourself for these acts of disrespect.
  
• I demand that you apologise to all friends of liberty and freedom of speech in the world.
  

I do not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall