Last night before voting on FRA law

Will Swedish parliament members take an important step towards a less civilized society tomorrow? Some of their party colleagues are blogging frequently today to try to set their minds. That they can take on a personal decision, just as Camilla Lindberg did last autumn. I read the blog of Henrik Oscarsson and he made a historical comparison. In the post WW2, the "cold war", our Swedish politicians became amazed of the possibility to tap ordinary people's telephone conversations. There were some new frenzy technology that made this easier and there were this threat (real or not) from the Soviet Union those days. The politicians couldn't keep their fingers off and the whole systematic, random tapping went off. Large integrity interference were being made. They were not able to control the security police force or the prosecutors at that time.

What is different of today is that we now do not have any threat being so direct and well established, No politician can formulate this in a clear and sensual way! I haven't seen one, nor have other political bloggers. In an debate article on Swedish Television home page, Mathias Sundin is making some enlightening comparisons. Imagine that the Swedish government want to document your letters sent to others, making matrices of your letter friends including frequency. They will then open the letter and scan it and hold a copy if they will detect some irregularities in your mailing patterns. That may happen today in North Corea, but Sweden? This is exactly what will happen with your e-mailing, telephone conversation, chatting, SMS and other electronic communication. How scared can one become?

Ignorance or what?

In media the coming voting (FRA, 14 Oct.) is of a no news character. But there is some activity in the blog world, at least. In general, the citizens do not bother. I've asked a number of people but they think that if it works out in a way that it will lead to stop or catch some more criminals, then it is OK. But that is not the real issue, is it? If you want to stop robbery or economic crime - do you then scan all citizen´s accounts like a normal thing? It is scanned, I know, but only by the bank in order to protect me from theft. I was lucky a couple of weeks ago when my bank called and said that they wondered about a withdrawal of approx 300 SEK from a vending machine in US. I had done a payment in my local food store about one hour earlier.

But I think that the police and others also liked to have that scan function in action all the time. In fact, if you could detect severe economic crime in real time - maybe we wouldn't have any more financial crises? Bonus payment in + billion USD! That's not very healthy for the world? What still is annoying me is the lack of motive that is driving this development. Is it still terrorism? Isn't that a brain ghost? A night mare? I can find up some more - even worse night mares. Will we sleep better at night with this? Will our government become even more suspicious? More data - more artifacts. Haven't we learned about the scares from the GWB administration and mass destruction weapons?

Wire-tapping - is this 2009?

I need to pinch my skin every now and then during this process where we are moving into a less civilized community. Why do we need wire-tapping in Sweden? Who has created the threat scenario? Where are the evidence? Top secret issue of course...

Reading last night (http://klamberg.blogspot.com/) about the details of how FRA wire-tapping will function I am even more confused. Can it be reasonable to spend 100´s of millions on hardware and computer analysts to tap people´s chat/mail/other communication routes on the traffic that is crossing the Swedish borders?

Why is this less civilized? I think that any society that has a need to check what ordinary people are doing or discussing has lost something essential. This essence is created of freedom of speech and a free will, to be able live your way of life. But now there is an overwhelming care from our government to protect us? From what? When we sentence criminals, then it is the free will and ability to communicate with others that is restricted and reduced. You can get the witness from those who get released from long sentences that the worst thing with it is getting your life restricted. Our overprotective government will now introduce this by starting to analyse our communications. Civilization must depend on people´s trust on each other and that our ordinary legislation and enforcement authorities will be enough as protection.

We have gone a long way to get where we are. Our grand parents and their parents have built our society of today and we should be proud of it. Why make it to a dead end?

Time for voting 14th Oct

The Swedish parliament will perform their voting of the revised FRA-legislation, now called wire-tapping legislation. After a rather nice democratic movement during autumn 2008 the government was forced to make some additions to the legislation in order to get it more friendly regarding people's integrity issues. The blog community was very active in that democratic movement and must now be seen as a breakthrough for blogs getting politically important.

So what has been added to the legislation? A court must be involved in any wire-tapping activity, only issues written in the law can be used as motive for wire-tapping, the court will decide exactly which wires that will be allowed to tap, there will be a mandatory information duty to those individuals that have been exposed to tapping and there will also be an independent committe that will monitor the tapping activities.

Anyhow, one Swedish parliament member, Camilla Lindberg says she still experience doubts. If she votes no, the additions that have been introduced due to her resistance will become denied. If yes, it is against her personal belief. Must be hard. Several parliament members were forced by their leaders in 2008 to not oppose their party agreements. Maybe not so democratic.