surveillance

Photo: crazyemt on Flickr.

“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: Bertelsmann Stiftung on Flickr.

The Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt, today confirmed in a documentary interview (Swedish link) that we are selling and buying intelligence data with dictatorships.

As you might have guessed the documentary was about the FRA-law and in part on how information gathered by the Radio Defense Agency is being or might be used.

It also discussed the methods used by the Government to push the Parliament into accepting the law and voting yes. How it was done can easiest be described as bullying. Individual MPs were threatened into voting yes, even by the Prime Minister himself.

This is starting to look less and less democratic for each report that becomes public… So maybe it isn’t such a weird thing that we deal surveillance data about our own citizens and our neighbours to dictators.

NOTE: This is the first “quick post”. These are posts written on the fly and often when I’m mobile. They will have more thoughts and general subjects and will not have any nice pictures like most of my other posts. All posts like this one will have their title marked with Q.P. In them.

During the summer the parliament has been closed and it officially re-opens on the 16th of September.

During this day the politicians visit certain sites in Stockholm according to traditions, and they’ll do the same this year. With one “minor” detail this year.

People will not be cheering for them. Instead they’ll be chanting anti-FRA-law slogans and showing up in thousands at the different sites.

There are two major demonstrations/manifestations that day and they’ll grow together into one around mid-day and speeches will be held by different oppositional politicians and civil liberties groups.

The discussions has been intense from the time the law took the first step into becoming a part of our legislation, and now even the parties (liberals and green liberals) that took part in pushing the law through parliament is taking a step back in the discussion and either request that the law be remade or totally dropped.

My private wish is that the law is dropped and that a truth commission be deployed to the FRA offices to find out exactly what they’ve been monitoring so far when they did not have positive juridical support, which is required for their type of business.

A secondary wish is that the FRA is demoted and maybe even dropped as a whole. If we need military singal-intelligence gathering, this can be done by the military intelligence force (MUST) as they are the one’s doing the in-battle SIGINT’s today. The people no longer trust the FRA with our secrets. Too much has leaked and politicians looking to using or supporting FRA are commiting political suicide.

In Sweden, we have never had the same disrespect and lack of faith in for our elected officials as we have right now. The coalition (Alliansen) that is the ruling force in Sweden right now will not be able to keep that position after the next election which will be held in 2010.

I do not think this is a good thing. In other aspects they are running the country in much better ways than the socialist government that was at power the previous mandate period. Corporate finances and the job market has not looked as good as it has done the last couple of years and we have been somewhat shielded from the economic failures of the United States.

It is a shame that our liberal and conservative parties are going about ruining the traditional Swedish ideas of a free and open society. They are destroying a lot of their credebility for years to come.

You might even take me as an example. Before they started this farse I was a member of the liberal party (Folkpartiet) but when they kept pushing this integrity-hostile law I left. I wonder how many others have done the same.

We’ll see what happens on the 16th… See you on the barricades

Photo: tienvijftien on Flickr.

A while back, in this post, I complained about a proposed law that was going to make it illegal not to report any crime witnessed.

It was a horrible idea as it would have brought Sweden to a DDR/Soviet-like society where you would have snitches that report ordinary citizens for rudimentary issues, while hardened criminals would go free as witnesses would not step forward if they had not reported the crime after seeing it.

Well, now it seems that the surveillance loving United Kingdom has started recruiting ordinary citizens to snoop on eachother and report issues like litter louts, dog foulers and even people who fail to sort out their rubbish properly.

Yeah. For real.

Slashdot story here, and the full story at ThisIsLondon.co.uk.

A lot of manifestations against the excessive surveillance reforms are coming in the next couple of months…

First, we have the ones against the Swedish FRA-law on the 16th of September that is going to be held in different places around Stockholm. Different groups are organizing these two.

Then there is “Freedom not fear 2008” in October. This is a manifestation to push awareness about the massive amount of surveillance laws popping up all over Europe. Read more here.

Don’t know how I missed the last one, but I found it through Security Bloggers Network and BelSec.

Cheers,

Photo: ph0t0 (sees the picture) on Flickr.

This is old news but I just heard about it, and it’s just sick. Haven’t UK politicians ever read 1984 (by George Orwell)?

They might as well call this system “Automatic Crimethought Detector”. It’s not efficient and has a lot of false positives/negatives that will lead to unnecessary spending on investigating innocent people. My guess is that the system itself is not very cheap and the ROI is probably extremely low.

I agree with the criticism put forth in the article:

For the Conservatives, shadow work and pensions secretary Philip Hammond said Gordon Brown’s obsession with a complex welfare regime was the real reason why so much was lost to fraudsters and cheats.

He said: “This government’s reaction to every problem is yet more Big Brother technology. Given that £2.6bn worth of benefits were overpaid last year alone, it’s disappointing that this re-heated lie detector initiative is the best it can come up with.”

Why do the western communities keep implementing systems that do not belong in an open society? Why? Haven’t we learnt shit from our history and great thinkers? Obviously not.

… and now it’s the government party’s own politicians and youth organizations that’s joining the opposition.

Why o’ why don’t they just let go? External pressure perhaps?

Hrmpf…

The Swedish parliament open on the 16th of September and large-scale protests is being planned by several independent organizations and political parties.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ends as the opposition is very strong. That is, if the Prime- or Defense-minister does not interfere directly (which is STRICTLY forbidden according to Swedish-law) I can’t see any other option than that the law is dropped.

The Government no longer has a majority position in this issue inside the parliament and as such it should be voted down by the opposition and the delegates that has switched opinions about the law.

And take Åkesson with you please!

Sten Tolgfors (Minister of Defense) and Ingvar Åkesson (Director of the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA)) has together almost completely discredited the sitting Government (which I liked until the started pushing laws that impede human rights and our constitution).

Now Tolgfors declares in a swedish debate article that no single person is being monitored, and by doing that he unintentionally implies that they are really doing surveillance of all citizens. He also repeats the same things that has been said before and alread broken down by other debaters and bloggers. One of these things are that traffic that does not match (the secret) algorithms used by FRA will be thrown away, and once again misses the point that once their supercomputers look at the traffic the breach of privacy is complete.

At the (almost) same time Ingvar Åkesson set out to hunt down one of the bloggers that are putting up the biggest fight, Henrik Alexandersson (HAX), and reports him to the Justice chancellor for publishing secret documents. These documents shows that The Radio Defense Agency has been monitoring swedish citizens since 1996 (!!!). One of them details 103 persons (including religious and financial leaders) that was being monitored and the other one is a breif of surveillance carried out on people that had business and educational contacts within Russia.

Of course, this was not a very good move. The response from bloggers and the Swedish Pirate party was to re-publish these documents and link to them on hundreds of blogs.

This was also enough to wake another “blog-quake” here in Sweden and put even harder press on the Government.

I personally can not believe that these people are still at their current positions. In other countries revelations and lies like those that are now being revealed would force the involved to resign immediately. If not voluntarily, then by force by the Prime Minister. And about the PM, where the hell is he in this debate? Total silence.

Sweden is going from a democratic state to something like DDR in 500mph.. I wonder where (or if) this is going end.

A small sidenote to this debate is that some political parties are going to suggest (one suggested, another one being readied for submission) the following laws:

* Police DNA registration of all citizens born after 1975 (3 million people, no joke, swedish link)
* A snitch law that would make it illegal not to report seeing a crime (swedish link again), this would bring the Soviet era back but this time here.

[irony] Niceness! [/irony].

What are the Swedish politicians thinking? I haven’t got a clue. I hope they have one… or maybe not, that might make this more frightening.

Hello everyone…

I’ve been a bit quiet again, mostly because of what has been going on in Sweden currently.

As you might have heard, a legislation that more or less make mass surveillance of all Swedish citizens has been voted through in Sweden. All in the name of preventing terrorism (and we havent had a terrorist deed on Swedish soil for 100 years, not joking). The way that this was done is not very nice and the Swedish Government has not done it’s job to protect the integrity of the people.

In fact, the law is so badly written that it actually violates,

* Swedish constitution

* European constitution

* The UN’s declaration of human rights

No I’m not lying. This is actually happening in Sweden. And it is being done by the parties that has had liberty and integrity as their motto.

The agency that is going to enforce this on the Swedish population is the Radio Defense Agency (FRA, Försvarets Radioanstalt in swedish) and they are well known to ignore all laws that regulates integrity breaching activities. Furthermore, during the last month’s they have openly told media that they are already ignoring and breaking the Swedish constitution. A document that leaked recently also shows that they are actually storing traffic and data (that is, both the envelope and the letter in physical terms) of all Swedish internet traffic and they have been doing so for almost 10 years. This agency is also currently under investigation by the Swedish Security Police (hope thats the correct translation, in swedish SÄPO) for privacy breaches.

Still, this agency is going to be given the “responsibility” of monitoring all Swedish citizens for “suspicious activities” (read Terrorism, the universal “Go ahead”).

There has been a lot of reactions to this. Among other things more than 3000 people protested when the law was voted through and there haas been even more protests for a month now. A huge protest is also being planned for the 16th of September when the parliament opens again after summer vacations and people are organizing buses from all over Sweden to go to Stockholm and participate.

Incredible work has been done to wake up the opposition by several well known blogs and prominent people. There has been several new organisations formed that are trying to get the law removed before it is effective, among those are www.stoppafralagen.nu, www.svartmandag.se and www.frapedia.se. The Pirate Party is also pushing hard to remove the law before it goes into permanent legislation.

All is not yet lost though! We can still push the Parliament to tear up the law before it goes into effect! Polls show that over 61% of the population strongly disagrees and is against the law.

More posts coming in a short while which will detail which political parties that, in their current IT-infrastructure setup, already are being monitored by FRA (which in turn reports directly to the sitting government).

More links to information in english:

FRAPedia.se - More information in english
Oscar Swartz - Mayday Mayday! Internet Wall of China - around Sweden!
The Pirate Party - PRES RELEASE: Practically a coup!