waffle

On June 17, very likely, the Swedish Riksdag (parliament) will pass a bill. This bill will in practicality allow the Swedish NSA to record every single piece of Internet traffic, every visited web site, every email, every instant message and maybe even calls made over a cellular network without asking anyone first. There is a Top 500 supercomputer built to record and process much of this traffic and continuously match everything against about a quarter of a million triggers. Once these wires are plugged in, it will be overwhelmingly difficult to talk any party into unplugging them.

The rationale is that this is done to protect us from “foreign threats” (a change from the earlier “foreign military threats”… I’ve been to this concert before); the criteria for what is allowed to record is “any traffic that passes through the country border”, which thanks to the miraculous architecture of the Internet is practically all traffic not taking place entirely between two nodes on a local network; furthermore, the reason this bill is being pushed is that it will pave the cow paths as regards the Swedish NSA’s previous wiretapping strategies — which relies on them having previously committed illegal wiretapping, which is now supposed to be retroactively forgiven and prolonged instead of being prosecuted!

This is outrageous in so many ways it’s not even funny, and that’s before I tell you that both major blocs have supported this sort of bill (first the red, then the blue) and that when the bill last surfaced, it was put on ice for a year for “attracting too much attention”. Not for being horrible. For attracting too much attention. This time around, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, since the Swedish media mostly won’t talk about it. So we need your help.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, details this bill and its disastrous consequences on his weblog, where he refers to it, suitably and bluntly, as the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill. Read this and try to get a feel for the incredible violation that’s about to happen to every single Swedish citizen when this law passes.