This morning there was a copyright related police raid against an unnamed Swedish server park. At the same time the worlds leading file sharing site The Pirate Bay went offline.
Intriguing, as TPB was supposed to be raid-proof nowadays.
TorrentFreak: Swedish Police Raid The Pirate Bay, Site Offline »
Update: Now, it’s official – TPB was the target of todays police raid »
I just read Rick Falkvinges piece “You Can’t Have Consent Of The Governed Without Privacy” at Privacy Online News. He points at something very serious and all to obvious: blanket mass surveillance is incompatible with democracy.
Apart from some small semantics I couldn’t agree more. I guess you will as well.
Rick has published a lot of texts along these lines. I have too. And so have countless others. Still, the seriousness of the matter doesn’t seem to sink in with people. I guess it’s too abstract.
To some extent the same is true for the Snowden files. They are hard evidence, from inside the NSA. But still, most people seems to be unable to relate to this information.
To make people listen–and react–mass surveillance and it effects must feel real to the common man.
We need to be on the lookout for stories like this one: Looks like Chicago PD had a stingray out at the Eric Garner protest last night »
We need to find the people who have had their lives messed up by warrantless mass surveillance. They are out there and we must tell their story.
To do this we shouldn’t just look at the NSA, GCHQ and other organisations collecting information–but at their “customers”. Where do the information go? And how is it used?
In Sweden, we know that our local NSA/GCHQ partner FRA relays information not only to the military, some branches of the police and the counter espionage–but also to the government, to the political administration. But still we don’t know what kind of information or how it is being used.
We also know that the FRA has access to NSA “Spy Google” data base XKeyscore. And it is pretty obvious that it contains information about our own nationals and domestic Swedish matters. It’s at our governments fingertips. But then secrecy kicks in. We don’t know how XKeyscore is used. We don’t even know the legal basis–or where the legal mandate comes from.
This is the kind of things we must look into. Now, when we know that mass surveillance exists (told you so) we must start to find out how it is being used. That’s when it all gets really interesting. And ugly, for sure.
Mass surveillance is not “just” a fact. It is not “only” something to have theoretical discussions about. It has real implications.
/ HAX
For some days I have been a complete political news junkie–as the latest Swedish government just went down in flames. Looking forward, naturally I have some general preferences about who should rule my country. (Even if a lame duck administration as the present one isn’t all that bad. Hopefully it will not be able to do a lot of stupid stuff.)
But when it comes to some of my favourite issues, I’m frustrated.
We have the centre-right parties (in power until September 2014)–being really bad on surveillance, ignorant at best when it comes to data protection and in the grip of the copyright industry.
Then we have the socdem-greens (that, in practice, fell from power yesterday). The Social Democrats are just as bad as the centre-right people in these matters. And the Greens are selling out on the same issues, just for the grandeur of being in government. (Come on, give the Ring back to the nice Mr. Frodo.)
The third group (causing most of the stir) are some nationalist, xenophobic and semi-populists. Again, they are just as bad. (I guess that they haven’t realised that they are a given target for government surveillance.) And in general they are occupied with nostalgia rather than issues concerning the future.
Finally we have the Pirate Party, not even in the Swedish parliament with only 0.43 per cent of the votes in the latest elections. (So I guess the general population doesn’t bother about these issues either…)
Still, the surveillance issues are important–and rather pressing. What the government does in the EU is important as we are in the process of hammering-out new European data protection rules. And an European copyright reform.
In the bigger picture a free and open Internet is essential for democracy, culture, business, science and education. Yet, in Sweden 99,57 per cent of the votes are casted on political parties more or less uninterested, ignorant or plain evil when it comes to Internet and surveillance matters.
And it seems that Sweden isn’t unique. The picture is the same in most countries.
In dark moments I think this might be just as well. There are no guarantees that politicians will do the right thing, even if they are interested. So it might be better to trust spontaneous order, peoples creativity, the market and net freedom activists to be one step ahead and to raise objections if politicians go wrong.
The problem is, politicians go wrong about the Internet, surveillance, data protection, copyright and civil liberties all the time. The fact that they are uninterested or ignorant doesn’t stop them. In most cases they just rubber stamp papers that government officials hand them, anyway. Politics is in the equation, like it or not.
So we need to apply a constant external pressure on politics. To show the way, to campaign and to hit politicians and government officials hard when they do something stupid or dangerous.
It’s a never ending struggle.
/ HAX
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is stuck in Russia, only being able to reach out to the world by video link. The same goes for Wikileaks Julian Assange, in limbo at Ecuadors embassy in London. Journalist and web activist Barret Brown spends his time in custody, waiting to be sentenced after looking too close into outsourcing of US national security matters.
This is in a way better for the US government than just throwing people in jail.
If you compare this to the case of whistleblower Chelsea Manning–her 35 year prison sentence for exposing the truth is clearly a stain on US reputation.
It’s more convenient for government to corner trouble makers elsewhere in the world or to constrain their actions with seemingly endless legal proceedings. It might not silence them–but it will hamper their work seriously. And you can (normally) do this without enraging human rights activists, hacktivists, the media and the general public too much.
It all bears a chilling resemblance to the way the Soviets treated many of their dissidents during the Cold War.
/ HAX
