The government has just made illegal wiretapping legal...

In Canada, politicians will agree: "I'd vote for this, and you'd vote against it, so we'd cancel. Let's not go."  But it's not formalized - parties can pull dirty tricks.  If I had been opposing this bill, I'd pull every dirty trick I could out of my hat.
 
First off, FRA won't catch any terrorists. They don't communicate by msn messenger. They use encrypted messages. If they use i.e. 256bit AES encryption, it'll take 30 years minimum for a 2,5 quad core processor to crack it. FRA will use 14000 xeon processors, but they still won't catch any terrorists. It will take too long time to crack, and too long time to discover.

But if somebody is watching the central exchange point, keys need to be exchanged in encryption initialization...and guess where those keys are going to pass. Take a look at RFC 4432 and you'll see what i mean. I have a home server running BSD UNIX that acts as DHCP/NAT/FW primarilly, eg. acts like router so whole internet traffic from and to my home network goes through that single point. I tested several out-of-the-box secure applications, such as secure-pidgin, https pages and IMAP via SSL email standard. Guess what? Simple packet sniffer running on my BSD box caught all keys, and logged raw encrypted communication, and i descrambled afterwards using those provided keys.

Imagine how many servers are between me and you in this moment, and how many points where you can sniff. That's called Man In The Middle scenario, and the only encryptions immune to this are keyless ones.

Organized terrorist groups have experts. And they probably have programmers that are advanced enough to implement their own custom encryption algorithm. Governments use public encryption methods because they can control all the points of communication. Keyless custom encyrption algorithms are unbreakable (even by brute-force, you don't know the mathematical logic of the algorithm). But they have their drawbacks, and i won't drag this offtopic anymore  :D

In any case, they're going to gain - nada, null, zero, nothing by monitoring internet traffic. They're maybe going to caught some skinhead groups planing the attack on the local China Shop, or football hooligans consolidating attack on the adversary group, etc, or local script kiddies / hacker wannabees doing some web site defacement. Someone with a bit of resources and a bit of adequate brainpower will be totally immune to this.

However, it may bring a piece of the puzzle to add to other, more standard mechanisms (police, army, secret service etc...), in terrorist hunt. However #2, this is the most absurd human rights violation...i'm going to write mails to someone describing how i played Red Alert and "nuked Americans' base", it's going to trigger the system and some jerk over there is going to read my mail, and there could be some deep personal and private things involved also, in the same mail.

It is possible to implement a system based on neural networks that would be able to understand something in it's right context, with gigabytes and gigabytes of raw input material for perceptrons. But, to be able to do that in real-time, for (x) languages, counting in the spelling and grammar errors and all variations such as l33t quasi-language...don't know, but that system would be huge. I don't know if it would be even out of our league regarding current advancements of computer sciences. That kind of system would be then already used (CERN and FermiLab both ring a bell), yet they don't have anything as powerfull and "intelligent".

So, in my humble, but also expert and in-field opinion, that thing is going to work on pure statistics, trigger words, repetition, that kind of stuff, sorted out by "relevance" depending on that statistical factor. Eg. a dumb word counter damaging your privacy.
 
And because of everything you said there, that's exactly why the law is pointless...and an invasion of privacy.  You're right about the ability to decrypt, but quite frankly...they'd never catch a terrorist anyway.  Terrorists aren't going to say things like..."I want to bomb X tomorrow" in their email.  They will use at least a rudimentary code.
 
And that all people in Sweden have no rights anymore?

I could be wrong here Foro, but I believe the right being discussed here is the right to privacy.

It may not be in a constitution or as formally written out as the right to vote, or for free speech, let's say; but it is indeed a right that many people expect and care about greatly.
 
Genghis Khan said:
@ Natalie, Yax and Anomica: Do you honestly believe a year from now this law will be in place?

It had better not be. But since when has Sweden made any sense (kvittning or whatever that is doesn't make any sense to me)? It's all politics of some sort or other which is ununderstandable especially in the light of the fact that Sweden is NEUTRAL. Our country makes no sense in this respect either since we manufacture weapons and fighter planes. We, a neutral country. It gets even better. The current government who did this whole wiretapping thing also wants to reduce the army (less funds, less planes, etc). So why go on the whole "public safety" rant, and "we must protect Sweden", because we have SO many enemies. I can see them now, those terrorists, planning to bomb, wait, what can they bomb in Sweden that's of any significance? Umm, let's see...IKEA! Or even better, lets scare those Lapps up in Lappland with a grenade because they have oil, oh no wait, TUNDRA.

As Raven pointed out to me, the only places with grudges against Sweden might be Dublin and Lindisfarne. And to be honest, I don't see them planning to bomb H&M's mother shop via email.
 
Law or not, FRA will continue to spy through cable and satellite as they've done for 10 years illegally, just like the ex. President of FRA said during a chat with a politician who was wired.
 
Sweden is NEUTRAL. Our country makes no sense in this respect either since we manufacture weapons and fighter planes. We, a neutral country.

One step towards full neutrality is the capacity to equip your army with domestic hardware. Selling is a different thing. But you can still sell and be neutral. For instance, USA won't sell a bullet to "unfriendly" countries (and mind you, they tend to declare some country unfriendly even if that country never showed any hostility towards them), and they even have different sub-configurations for specific type of hardware that are dependent on how much the buyer country is "friendly" with USA.

Selling to every country that can afford it would be total neutrality (and total i-don't-give-a-damn at the same time).

As much as i know, JAS-39 was offered to a lot of "different" countries, ones in NATO or leaning towards NATO (Hungary/Croatia), ones that were always a customer of Soviet Union/Russia (India), and ones that aren't leaning to any side (Austria). That shows a neutral commercial policy of SAAB's.

But yeah, you're right. Sweden is probably a last Western country i would bomb if i were a terrorist. I see no target and no reason. Western propaganda always says that terrorists don't pick targets and act without reasoning, but that's totally wrong. They use no morale and common sense when picking the target, but they sure have reasoning. Bombings of Madrid and London made a lot of NATO countries rethink their campaign in Iraq.

A bit more offtopic, but regarding terrorism. Madrid and London is what i call terror. On the other hand, muslim extremist blowing up American APC is not a terrorist...his target is army, and regardless of the fact that he hasn't got an uniform, rank, or even clear chain of command, every armed person in wartime stops being civilian and becomes a warrior.

Therefore...not going into what side you're on, it's soldier on soldier, and there's no terrorist there.

To go back to Sweden...when a lot of people on high governmental positions want to implement a law such as this one, i can only think of two things;

- A) There's a real terrorist threat to Sweden and those people know it, but won't inform the public.
- B) Somebody influential has lobbied the law, to use it in his own advantage, of course.

I may be supportive of some conspiracy theories, but i think that the B. answer really says why you're getting your privacy disturbed.
 
Yax said:
Anomica, the answer to why 20% didn't vote is: Kvittning, as the term is in Swedish. With every member of the parliment absent from one block, one member must put down his vote on the other side, and therefore counts as not present. So basically, if 20 fro the social democrates are absent, 20 from the right block must proclaim themselves absent too, in order to sustain the powerbalance in the chamber.
I'm aware. I just find it really bad form that so many abstain when it's such a provocative and controversial piece of legislation. Cowards!

And yes, I believe the law will be in play one year from today. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for chasing terrorists. What I'm against is this "guilty until proven innocent" concept that this law in effect uses. Everybody will be tapped in the hope of finding one or two bad boys doing bad things. Usually in a democracy, police must have some kind of proof in order to legally bug an offender. This is just putting everything on its ass and I don't like what's happening in Sweden.
 
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