waffle

The Swedish parliament passed a law implementing the EU directive IPRED today. It was an optional EU directive, so they didn’t have to, but they did it anyway, the bastards.

IPRED stipulates that any rights holder may, as long as they can produce cursory evidence, retrieve the personal information related to the current assignee of a specific IP address from the ISP that maintains the IP block. They may then — they will then — use this information to prepare threats of litigation in civil court in case a fine is not paid.

Let’s take this wrong by wrong:

• Never mind what actually transpired, the holder of the IP address will be accused. This means that if you own a wireless base station (hint: very likely), share an IP address with someone else (hint: yes), or own a computer that is connected to the Internet and not magically excepted from security vulnerabilities (hint: yes), you may unwittingly be targeted.

• Unless ISPs actually log not only who had what IP address at what time (this is common and correct) but who they contacted using what kind of traffic (this is a violation of privacy), the evidence is trivially falsifiable. In the case of a torrent, skewing the clock of the machine collecting the evidence by a few hours, or with good timing just a few minutes and a dynamically assigned IP’s lease with one customer may have expired and been reassigned to someone else will do just fine to frame a completely different person — and that’s if they don’t make up shit randomly, which is entirely within their range technically. Imagine being put in jail on the basis that when an arsonist’s phone number lapsed, you were the next in line.

• Private information is being made available to private companies. You can trace people based on their Internet activity for something that isn’t even a criminal case. Police powers are being outsourced. I think even the libertarians in the audience recognize how dangerous this is, because this sort of allowance for execution of police tasks by private actors is central in a certain kind of system with a perfectly established name — fascism.

There’s more by the bookload, but I’m getting depressed just thinking about it. This is part of the systematic perversion of the rule of law and dismantling of basic democratic and human rights in order to benefit an ailing private industry with zero respect for its customers, and it sickens me deeply.

The law will take effect on April 1st, which would tell you everything you’d need to know if it weren’t so tragic.