In todays SvD editorial (Swedish), PJ Anders Linder writes about the risks with increased supervision of citizens but the Swedish government and that no matter what the nobel reasons driving these actions are, they are no in proportion to the intrusion in privacy. I am not sure I share all his concerns. I believe the key to an acceptable tradeoff is the mechanisms used to allow access to this data by various government agencies, not the collection itself. I also believe that the collection of data at some level is necessary. The opponents to surveillance often defend various actions with the argument that the Internet is a copy of society at large. I have myself often used this defense pointing out that crime and illegal activities on the Internet is merely copies or advancement of crimes in our daily lives. But what we forget is that in society around us, we assume that law enforcement and the government will protect the system, and pro and reactively protect us from criminals and track them down once a crime is committed. In order to allow them to do this, we have given up some of our freedoms. We allow search warrants, surveillance (in the physical sense), and in some countries / cases even provocation of crime.
For some reason we don't have the same acceptance for intrusions on the Internet. The Pirateparty get 7.1% of the votes for the Swedish seats in the European Parliament. It's hard to analyze how much of those are based on true concerns and agreement with the party politics and how of the votes are protests against the traditional parties, but it's clear that these are issues that raises concerns for the citizens. But why co we accept something in our "off-line" society, but not in the on-line society? I have heard several people argue the reason is that social networking sites collect a lot more about our lives than what we aggregate about our selves in the real world. Maybe. But is that true? Is data gathering activities on our on-line activities that will only be shared with the government after a court ruling really more intrusive that physical surveillance in the "real world"?
I have an alternative explanation. Or perhaps complementary. I think that part of the reason we here in Sweden (and this might not apply in other countries, and might also be the reason why these issues are so high on the agenda in the Swedish political debate) see the massive opposition to giving government agencies more tools for crime prevention and investigation on the Internet, is that the proposals coincided, and in the public, got tightly linked to other events. Mostly they got associated to the actions of the recording industry, and their attempts to open up venues for action against broadband subscribers outside the legal system. This started with the previous socialdemocratic government and the then justice minister Thomas Bodström, who on numerous occasions sympathized with the needs of the recording industry. He was also one of the main proponents of the EU Dataretention directive, a directive that had/have nothing to do with the struggle of the recording industry. The most obvious case is that in 2006 the Swedish police raided the Bittorrent site/tracker, The Priate Bay. This provoked strong reactions in the swedish "bloggosphere". Shortly afterwards the Swedish government launched the bill for allowing the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) access to tap telecommunications traffic passing the borders, where concerns that the government without insight would be allowed to register all activity on the Internet. Further, the vagueness on who would have access to the data didn't help. Citizens started getting concerned with how their digital lives where really being tracked and used but the government and a vast opposition against the law forced the government into compromise. The fact that the law would have passed even with the opposition in power and that the differences between most of the political parties (with the exception of the environmentalist and left wing party) where semantical. They where not against giving FRA access to the data, just the process for doing so.
The debate raised the issues, and following on more and more EU legislation with regard to registration followed, making sure to keep the debate alive. At the same time, the various rights-holders groups, antipiratbyran (anti-priacy bureau) etc stepped up their efforts and made more and more public action, making sure that their assaults on pirates (And partly the legal system) was being known. At the same time they kept feeding the debate on government data collection, and feeding the fear that the data collected could also be used for petty crime such as file sharing. The rights-holder associations would have happily supported such a development but instead their actions effectively made implementation of the Dataretention directive politically impossible. The latest news is that it might be proposed as a law this fall. In the mean time the EU sued Sweden for the delay in implementation. To add to the fury, swedish parliament passed the IPRED directive, forcing operators to hand over identities of broadband subscribers to the rights-hodler, even for petty crimes such as file sharing. But IPRED only comes into play if you have the data, so several operators shortened the time they needed to save the identities, effectively making the the IPRED law useless. In combination with the Dataretention directive that could change though, depending on what the law actually says.
Yesterday Swedish radio show "Konflikt" discussed the implications of more surveillance on the Internet. The show summs up the issues very well and also seems to highlight the fact that the scare is really of how the data collected might be used in the future rather than that citizens are truly worried about using the data for their original intended purposes.
I believe it's now up to the political parties to show that the scare expressed is not needed. The only way to do so, is to resolutely show the citizens that they will not give into various, albeit strong, lobby groups such as the recording and movie industries. They need to show that the data is kept in a way to protect integrity and only used for national security, and not to solve poor legacy business models of various interest groups. The actions of the rights holders have severely damaged the trust in the legal system and the ability of government to protect individuals long term. The recording industry is starting to look very much like that banks - they forgot they where acting in a consumer market, where trust from your customers is essential to success. You will only get as far as you can keep up consumers buying behaviours. Instead of catering to this and working with consumers and try and be ahead in the consumption trends, both industries worked against their own customers in their own self interest. When that failed they ran to the government and asked for bailout. Be it in cash or draconian legislation. If we extrapolate what that made for public opinion on the banks, the recording industry probably didn't do their own sales any good.
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