Wiretapping Law Sparks Rage In Sweden

Found on Slashdot on Monday, 16 June 2008
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This Wednesday at 9am the Swedish Parliament is voting on a new wiretapping law which would enable the civil agency (FRA - Defense Radio Agency) to snoop on all traffic crossing the Swedish border. E-mail, fax, telephone, web, SMS, etc. 24/7 without any requirement to obtain a court order.

Nonetheless, the ruling party block is supposedly pressuring its members to vote 'yes' to this new proposed law with threats to unseat any dissidents. After massive activity on blogs by ordinary citizens, and street protests, the story has finally been picked up by major Swedish news sources. The result will likely be huge street protests on Wednesday.

Say goodbye to freedom and hello to encryption. However, I wonder if this law will work as planned, considering that due to the routing nature of the Internet, nobody really knows which routes his traffic takes. So it may very well run through Sweden; in the end, they'd be spying on citizens of other nations and I'm not sure of those nations will be too happy (if citizens make their governments act on this). The funny thing is that those who should be monitored, e.g. terrorists and the organized crime, will simply nullify those efforts by using strong encryption (or, even more embarrassing for the FRA, by using old school mail).