World +dog ignores Sweden’s Draconian wiretap bill
[Quote:]
Sweden is on the verge of passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government’s spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country.
So far, hacks from the mainstream Swedish press seem to be on holiday, so news about the proposed law is woefully hard to come by. That leaves us turning to this summary from the decidedly left-leaning Swedish Pirate Party for details. We’d prefer to rely on a more neutral group, but that wasn’t possible this time. According to them, here’s a broad outline:
The En anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet bill (which loosely translates to “a better adapted military intelligence gathering”) gives Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) direct access to the traffic passing through its borders. Now remember, we’re talking about the internet, which frequently routes packets though multiple geographically dispersed hops before they reach their final destination.
This all but guarantees that emails and voice over IP (VoIP) calls between Swedes will routinely be siphoned into a massive monitoring machine. And we wouldn’t be surprised if traffic between parties with no tie to the country regularly passes through Sweden’s border as well, and that too would be fair game. (For example, email sent from a BT address in London to Finland is likely to pass through Sweden first.)
[..]
“The funny thing is when asked what do you want to look for, [backers of the bill] don’t really specify what they’re interested in,” he continued. “It’s a very broad bill. They basically can interpret whatever they like.”
I’m sure this will make Sweden a lot safer… right?