Talk – 2 comments
CULTURAL ANGST and The end of free communications?
How net activists fought "Lex Orwell" and created political crisis in Sweden in June 2008
UPDATE: An unprecedented firestorm of activism from bloggers managed to almost sink the proposed Lex Orwell mentioned below. There is now an unravelling political crisis in Sweden where the net generation has lost faith in the political process. The campaign will make the history books in Sweden and the last word has not been said yet. I will try to cover what happened when bloggers turned media against the parliament and for the first time in years managed to gather large chanting crowds outside the parliament as well as making the Swedish Journalists' Federation appear with them to ask the MOPs to vote NO. This was just days ago and hence fresh news.
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Based on two reports I wrote for Swedish liberal/libertarian think-tank Timbro (but presented together with leftist think-tank Ordfront) I discuss the initiatives to curtail free communications in Sweden and EU, both from a legal and broader cultural perspective.
I put the development in a broader cultural context where I see the Internet as undermining old authorities and hierarchies. The established powers respond by waging unwinnable wars against imagined enemies and ill-defined groups: "terrorists", "pirates" and "pedophiles". These wars curtail freedom of communications with results that will come to haunt us. With that framework in mind I propose "freedom-based" responses to cope with the cultural angst that the Internet apparently leads to for the old world authorities. We don't have to - and should not! - abolish free communications.
Techniques adopted by the state include surveillance of traffic, content filtering, data retention, criminal and civil (sue for damages) means of attacking Internet users and ISPs. The most Orwellian law of them all might be passed by the Swedish parliament on June 17, 2008. All Internet traffic that passes the border of Sweden will be copied to the state "secret service". It will be challenged by activists since it most likely breaks the European Convention on Human Rights. Hopefully this proposed talk can lead to a qualified discussion about experiences in other countries. Some initiatives are at EU level.
My think tank papers downloadable for free (in Swedish):
swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/rapporter-av-oscar-swartz.html
(By the way, the titles in Swedish contain the word "Bodströmsamhället". It means "Bodström society". Mr Bodström was our former Minister of Justice in Sweden, who had a true love affair with snooping, surveillance, filtering, legislating ... a Big Brother society in the Internet era.
2 comments
Thanks Kim
Yes I know, Denmark is worse in several ways, just as you say. Sweden is worse in one aspect only as far as I know(that law that may be passed soon). I wrote extensively about the Danish interpretation of EU law when a court ordered a Danish ISP to block access to Swedish-based web site The Pirate Bay. I claimed the court decision was erroneous and broke an EU directive: swartz.typepad.com/texplorer/2008/02/pirate-bay-vs-1.html . This led to Danish ISP:s challening the block legally after several Danish papers cited my analysis. Would be great to compare notes between international participants on these issues.
Denmark is similar (if not worse)
ISPs are required to keep logs of traffic for 5 years, mobile SPs are required to exchange information about cell-phone usage and the cell for pin pointing the location of the users.
Since 2002 and the passing of new Anti-Terror legislation (Terror Pakken), the secret service and the police has basically been given literally free hands to surveil the population, purely on suspision.
The private association IT Politisk Forening (Organisation for IT Policy) is trying to document what is going on, and maintains this page about surveilance (in Danish): www.itpol.dk/hvad-vil-it-pol/overvagning.
IT politisk has also developed a Linux distribution, Polipix, wih privacy tools, to demonstrate how the legislation can be bypassed, and thus has no effect in stopping the real criminals