In a couple of weeks the trial against TPB is going to start and the word on the street is that they’re going to slammed in the first instance (Tingsrätten, District court) as these are run in part by politically elected lay judges.

You can have any feelings you want about The Pirate Bay and file-sharing, but always remember what this trial really is about.

It’s not about file-sharing, if that’s what you thought. It’s really about is whether or not we are going to further impede the freedom of speech and ban linking to content that might contain copyrighted material as that is all that they (TPB) do.

That means that any sucker that links to a YouTube video might be raided (as of the IPRED1 implementation) by the copyright owners, and then you have not even embedded the Video on you site.

I would like all Swedish politicians, judges and people of influence in these matters to listen to this presentation by Lawrence Lessig:

It won’t take much time (~40 mins maybe) and it’s worth every second. He really pinpoints the effects of todays black/white climate in the debate and what the effects of this might be on society.

People do not trust the decision makers (rightfully so) to make the right choices, and the erroneous laws being passed are not respected. As people are not respecting these laws, this leads to the notion that all laws that has been created and or managed by them are not worth caring about. This leads to a general despise of politicians and their mandate with the people is lost.

We are starting to see the effects of this already in many forums. Just read what I’ve written earlier about politicians from my former political party (Folkpartiet, supposed to be the Liberal party) and you’ll get the picture.

Anyways, the trial starts on the 16th of February and I’m going to relay as much of the Swedish information published as possible in English.

For those that doesn’t know this already, Australia is one of the countries that are actively filtering and censoring the internet. They are doing this to “protect” their citizens from the big bad wolves that reside in the internet tubes without giving their citizens liberty even a second glance.

Read this on the Australian security firm Sûnnet Beskerming’s blog:

“In the lead up to last year’s national election in Australia there were a range of promises made by the incumbent government, under the name NetAlert, which was reported to be for a range of projects including Internet blocking software at the user end, tracking down online predators, and filtering of traffic on the network.

“There can be no other way to put it other than to suggest that these efforts are being pushed through out of an ignorance of the structure and nature of the Internet, even when accurate information is readily available.”

It’s really frightening to see how fast things can go bad. So far we have not seen this kind of lunacy here in Sweden but it feels like we’re getting there.

The internet’s content is not to be controlled by any unique institution or governing organization, as the whole idea of it is then lost. The Internet is a place that should be a free, unbiased, space for information of all kinds from all sources. Sure some will be hostile, but this is not a reason to filter it.

Doesn’t the Australian politicians relate what they’re doing to what dictatorships are doing? Can’t they see that they’re heading down a very dangerous path by restricting free speech? Besides this being a anti-democratic thing, remember that a society that closes on itself and censors it’s citizens never can evolve at the same speed as the world surrounding them, and therefor the country will suffer both economically and culturally.

The Internet was born free and should remain that way. If we can’t do that, then the whole idea behind it is dead and it’s time to form a new network.

Are you with me?

Power without oversight equals abuse!

From The NY Times – “Panel to Study Military Eavesdropping” (4-page article):

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, said Thursday that the committee would investigate claims by two military eavesdroppers that they routinely listened in on private calls home from American military officers, aid workers and journalists stationed in Iraq.

Former intelligence officers were interviewed by ABC News and by James Bamford, above, who has written a book about the National Security Agency due to be published next week.

Mr. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, called the accusations “extremely disturbing.”

“Any time there is an allegation regarding abuse of the privacy and civil liberties of Americans it is a very serious matter,” he said.

More references:
ABC News – Exclusive: Inside Account of U.S. Eavesdropping on Americans
UPI.com – Spy agency accused of improper listening
Reuters.com – U.S. probes claims officials eavesdropped on calls

Apparently the US’s multi-billion surveillance system is used to wiretap personal calls, and joking around about them. Will our system be used in the same way? For sure, power without oversight equals abuse. This is worth repeating.

Found this news first on Bruce Schneier‘s blog.

Well, just don’t add them.

A-R-G-H-H-H.

Swartz used this as an illustration. It’s right on.

The situation is now like this;

The parliament has voted on the Telecoms package. As familiar, amendment 166 was voted into the package and thus providing european citizens with protection against arbitrary disconnection from the internet and privacy.

So far all good and here’s the voting results from EU-parliament so you can read for yourselves.

Now the matter moved on to the “WORKING PARTY ON TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION SOCIETY” whose job is to prepare the package for either a second hearing, or if everyone are still agreeing, for the ministers for OK’ing.

HOWEVER (always seem to be a however in my posts), what they are now doing is more or less editing away the amendments that were added and making it as they (the french, primarily) want it. Yep, that’s right, they are actually editing the democratic decision by the parliament to fit the lobbying organizations needs. A leaked document shows us this progress and the evidently left out “Article 32a” which would be the one containing amendment 166′s content.

We now need to make some noise! But not just the (crazy?) swedes, everyone! If you are from another European country please send e-mails to your MEP’s and/or call them and ask them to follow-up on and verify that their democratically voted decisions stands firm! Remind them that if this can be changed, so can their own main issues and that this should not go unnoticed through a democratic system!

I’m getting seriously tired of writing about politicians and others tricking and removing citizens rights.

Can’t any of them please break the trend so I can write something nice?

Others writing (mostly in Swedish, use the translator): Oscar Swartz, Opassande, Josef, scaber_nestor, farmorgun, Frihet-Fildelning&Feminism, satmaran, Jens. O, HAX.

Others posting this image to raise awareness of DRM-dangers (in Swedish) are Opassande, Dennis, Daniel. Probably a lot of others as well but these were the ones conveniently linked from Emma (Opassande) and I’m lazy today

And another comment in english on the suggested swedish IPRED1 implementation from paf (also posted the XKCD image).

Cheers,

Even though it doesn’t need to be… Here we go again… Not really sure I’ve got the energy for this lunacy…

First off, what’s the IPRED1 directive?

Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive 1 (IPRED1) is a directive created by lobbyists and pushed through the EU by a woman married to a record company executive. The gist of the directive is to enable rightsholders to force counterfeiting middle-men to tell where they got the goods from. So in the beginning this was but this was about physical counterfeiting. Along the way it got a bit manhandled by the IP-lobbyists and record companies and finally was voted through in the form of a law that would allow private companies to demand ISPs to hand over their client data for a specific client, so that the rightsholder could sue.

However,

The EU IPRED1 directive is not forced upon any member state in the European Union as ruled by the European Court of Justice (source EFF). From the article:

In a much-anticipated decision, the European Court of Justice ruled yesterday that European Community law does not require EU Member States to impose an obligation on ISPs to divulge customer data in response to a request from a copyright holder who alleges that copyright infringement has taken place. The decision in Promusicae v. Telefonica involved a request made by a Spanish music rightsholder association (Promusicae) to Spain’s leading ISP (Telefonica) for personal data about Telefonica subscribers using particular dynamic IP addresses, which Promusicae alleged were engaged in filesharing.

The European Court of Justice was asked to interpret a mesh of overlapping EU Community laws and answer the question: does European community law require EU Member States that are implementing this suite of EU directives to impose an obligation on ISPs to divulge their customers’ personal data to rightsholders in a civil copyright lawsuit? The court ruled no, but with some qualifications. Thus, the Spanish law is valid and Telefonica will not be forced to divulge its customers’ data.

And what does the Swedish government, with the help of record company lobbyists do now?

They go ahead and suggest a Swedish implementation and law which would grant MORE power to the IP-holders, effectively creating a corporate police which can, without any real evidence, get the identity of the person owning a specific IP-adress.

The law that is now proposed actually grants these commercial interests more power than the Swedish police.

Actually, it is so over-implemented so it actually breaches the directive’s own regulations which states:

3. Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall apply without prejudice to other statutory provisions which:
(a) grant the rightholder rights to receive fuller information;
(b) govern the use in civil or criminal proceedings of the information communicated pursuant to
this Article;
(c) govern responsibility for misuse of the right of information; or
(d) afford an opportunity for refusing to provide information which would force the person
referred to in paragraph 1 to admit to his own participation or that of his close relatives in an
infringement of an intellectual property right; or
(e) govern the protection of confidentiality of information sources or the processing of personal
data.

I mean come on.. If I, an uneducated IT-nerd with a taste for bodybuilding can find, read, and understand this, then why can’t the people preparing our laws do the same?

So, the question remains;

WTF?

Yep. That’s really the question. What the f*ck?

This, if voted through in parliament, will create a situation like the one in the US where companies threaten with lawsuits that no one can afford to challenge, effectively forcing you to pay up even though you haven’t done anything wrong.

Next question is the use of IP-addresses as evidence. What value does an IP-address have in Sweden today where most ISPs ship unsecured wireless APs as the default router? Not much.

This also presents more questions, like “If downloading torrents in an internet café, is the café liable?” and “What are your rights if a neighbour uses your WLAN, willingly or without knowing it, and downloads pirated material? Are you liable?”.

And again, why does this law grant commercial interests powers that now even our police have? Where’s the logic? It’s so glaringly see-through, ordered and paid for, lobbyist crap that has been suggested as a law.

As I wrote in some of the first FRA-posts… Where will this end?

Other writing about this in Swedish (plz use Google translate): Rick Falkvinge (PP), Opassande, HAX, El Rubio.

And here’s the whole crapfest that our swedish, newly suggested, law claims to be born out of.

“It doesn’t really work.”

From Cnet (via BoingBoing):

A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.

The whopping 352-page report, called “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,” amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department’s controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.

Whoops… Where did the terrorism argument go Mr.Tolgfors? Lost it did ya’?

More seriously though, I hope that our Swedish politicians will read and understand the facts in the report… It’s just ridiculous that they haven’t done so already.

Read more at CNet!

Photo: Remixed by me, originals by MathewBlack, Maol and Shaz Pur on Flickr.

What I wrote about in the last post turned out to be true. Folkpartiet (the liberal party (yeah right), click here for english info) has chosen to wrap some silk lining around the FRA-law and OK it.

Then why the charade pretending that you really want to change the law? Why did you, the six MPs that initially opposed the law, say “Tear it, Do it again, and this time do it right”?

Populistic crap. My confidence in politicians has hit rock bottom.

Weak, uneducated, fascistic, control obsessive, technology frightened people.

You call yourselves “liberal”? Try “fascist” instead.

So you say this new version of the law would require the “go ahead” from a court? But why should an open society give a “go ahead” to any unwarranted wiretapping whatsoever? Wiretap criminals, not citizens!

The internet was born free and should stay that way, anything else is anti-democratic and limiting to freedom of speech.

Also, the presence of a surveillance system of this type raises the question of “What if I’m being monitored?” which prohibits habits which are extremely valuable to keep a society open. Motivating these kinds of laws with fear of terrorism and the good old fear of Russia is FUD tactics and is a low-level marketing or political tactic. From Wikipedia:

Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is a “tactic” of rhetoric used in sales, marketing, public relations[1][2] and politics. FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative (and vague) information. An individual firm, for example, might use FUD to invite unfavorable opinions and speculation about a competitor’s product; to increase the general estimation of switching costs among current customers; or to maintain leverage over a current business partner who could potentially become a rival.

The term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry and has since been used more broadly.[3] FUD is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

Ugly. Plain ugly. And we elected these politicians.

In their motivations they also draw references to the German wiretap laws that works in the same way. This law has been heavily critized by several organizations and the last reports showed that many citizens hesitate, or simply do not, call helplines or make other sensitive calls in fear of being monitored.

Neils C. Scorrel writes in “German Tap Lessons” (1 | 2):

“When it comes to keeping tabs on its own residents in the ongoing war on terror, there’s a lot the United States could learn from Germany. Interestingly, the lessons would not be from Nazi Germany, where average citizens were encouraged to report on their neighbors, or from East Germany, where hundreds of thousands of people provided damning evidence about their friends and families. Neither regime lived up to its popular reputation as an all-knowing spy state.”
[...]
“September 11 and revelations of a Hamburg cell’s involvement gave authorities added incentive to increase the surveillance. During the past decade, Germany has increased its use of wiretaps by 500 percent. In 2004 alone, more than 29,000 wiretaps were approved, seven times the number authorized by U.S. courts that same year. The bulk of these taps are focused on common criminals—money launderers, extortionists, and the like. But a small percentage is aimed at people who fit the profile of potential terrorists.

Yet German authorities cannot point to a single successful prosecution of a terror suspect identified from these blind wiretaps. The colossal volume of information produced from tens of thousands of these taps often obscures real threats, while dead ends are pursued. Authorities quite simply do not have the time to listen to and process it all.”
[...]
“So, why haven’t wiretaps yielded much information about terror operations? Part of the reason is that terrorists have become savvier. They’ve learned not to discuss sensitive matters by telephone. They use couriers and shared e-mail accounts to send messages instead. But, more important, there is simply far too much information for authorities to wade through. Key points are hidden by the reams of data that modern society generates. Increasing the number of wiretaps often just increases the size of the haystack, making the needle that much harder to find.”

Why are our politicians so god damned uneducated? Why are they creating laws that aim at closing down our open and democratic society? Why do I even have to make this connection? Shouldn’t it already have been considered?

Below are the six MPs that with their populistic campaigns made us believe in them and not pursue other avenues of possible countermeasures against our government. For contact details, follow the links.

Camilla Lindberg, Birgitta Ohlsson, Agneta Berliner. Maria Lundqvist-Brömster, Cecilia Wikström and Solveig Hellquist.

Some might think that I’m attacking the wrong politicians and that these are the ones that has actually made an effort to change something. You might think that the guilty ones are those that say nothing and just vote as they’re told.

Other bloggers are referring information given to them by these people and saying that “There will be no automated information transfer to FRA, this is a Win!”. Woopedidoo. Internet got semi-filtered and we consider it a win? Give me a break.

I do not agree with any such comments. Neither do I trust anything that come out of these politicians mouths. These are the ones that has acted to divert the citizens criticism until it was too late.

These are the ones that stood in front of thousands of people that took the streets on the 16th of September and said that they would tear up the law, redo it, and do it right.

These are the ones that appeared on national television ensuring us that the law would be killed and that no one that was not suspected of a crime would not be susceptible to wiretaps.

Yet another silky pink bow… That’s all they’ve done. Weak.

If they really are going ahead with this (and it looks pretty much so) it’s a huge lose. No win. Just lose.

Another person that feels like that is Mark Klamberg, a leading Folkpartiet politician and FRA-opposition leader. When these plans were unveiled he immediately left the party and ended all of his responsibilities. Credit to him for putting his money where his mouth is.

The people’s last chance to reverse will soon be to wait for the next election, replace the government, and vote as many mandates as possible to the Pirate Party or (I do not like this) the left wing party.

For some strange reason, those are the only ones that really oppose mass surveillance in our society.

Why is that?

Others writing (swedish though, run them through translate.google.com) about this: HAX, Copyriot, Mark Klamberg, Christian Engström (PP), Rick Falkvinge (PP), Opassande, Rosetta Sten (Anna troberg), Deep.edition, Svensson, BrokeP (TPB).

From TheLocal.se:

Sweden welcomes EU telecoms vote:

Sweden’s EU parliamentary delegation is rejoicing following a decision by the body to toss out a proposal that would have banned file sharers from the internet and forced internet service providers to filter content in the hunt for pirated material.

This is what I wrote about in yesterday’s post and it’s really great news for the european internet users.

Goverment getting closer to surveillance law compromise:

A proposal to introduce a special court to decide when Sweden can monitor cross-border communications traffic is expected to help unify the governing parties around a new version of the country’s controversial surveillance law.

This is not a good thing. We need to tear up the law, research what needs exist and then build a law that conforms to our actual needs and that has individuals integrity and human rights as a high priority. This is not something that has been done incedibly enough.

Instituting a special court is just like, as some sensibly put it, putting a pink silk bow around a piece of shit.

It’s still stinks but it looks nicer :/

In my fight to keep up on what is being written about the integrity and freedom impairing EU-regulations and laws, I seem to have mixed up some crucial facts.

When reading HAX’s blog I’ve mixed the news about the Telecoms Package and Marianne Mikko’s media-report which suggests registration of bloggers and their motives (impairing free speech etc. etc.).

So, in regards to my last post, the status of our core issues are the following…

M.M.’s media report which will ban anonymous blogging: This is what EPP-ED will vote No to. Still might need some pushing on the Green, ALDE and InDem groups!

Telecoms Package: Still needs a lot of action from Europe’s population in order to make all of our MEPs realise that it is a bad idea to engage in arbitrary, commercially controlled, punishing of citizens by internet disconnection and performing filtering and control over information that really just wants to be free.

Henrik Alexandersson writes on his blog (in regards to EU Telecom/Media-Report/FRA surveillance etc.):

“Skall vi lyckas stoppa galenskaperna, då måste vi veta vad vi talar om..”
English:
“If we are going to make this madness, then we must know what we are speaking about”

And I could agree more. Facts set straight now!

Previous post will not be edited to “correctness”. What is published is published and should stay that way, but I might add in overstrikes with a new reference in some.

I seriously need to stop posting when I almost can’t hold my eyes open.. sigh…