According to a leaked law proposal, which has been obtained by the Swedish Internet provider Bahnhof, the Swedish government is doubling down on the court-banned and hated data retention surveillance. As a Western first, they're also planning to introduce VPN surveillance, taking a page out of Russia's and China's oppression playbooks, and are mandating that the Internet be built not to optimize speed and throughput, but to optimize governmental surveillance.
takyon: A Privacy International report has found that 21 EU member states (including Sweden) have data retention legislation that may not comply with Court of Justice of the European Union judgments. Also at TechCrunch.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday September 14 2017, @02:56PM (3 children)
That is exactly how they think. That is how they all think. If they, ie the "good guys", are doing it then it's all fine. If someone else, ie "the bad guys", are doing it then it's horribly evil and dastardly. It's the same with any sort of spying really, "we spy on our enemies, we are good, they spy on us they are bad" or "people that spy for us, even foreign nationals, are heroes and courageous, our own citizens or employees that spy for the enemy are horrible traitors". Example; Snowden is a horrible traitor to the American intelligence community, a hero to some others. If he had been Boris Snowden from Russia and he had worked at FSB or SVR the Russians would have hated him for doing what he did, but the Americans would probably have loved him for exposing the evil Russian espionage operations and tactics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:08PM (2 children)
Putin on Snowden [reuters.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday September 14 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
Which is all from the perspective that Snowden was/is an American, from the comments Putin gave we can probably conclude that his opinions had been somewhat different if Snowden has been a Russian citizen and had released information about the FSB intelligence gathering operations.
The first and second quotes are just just hilarious. The second one then probably says more about how Russia views their neighbors, ie as vassals. The third quote just brings it all home.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:59PM
"If he had been Boris Snowden from Russia and he had worked at FSB or SVR the Russians would have hated him for doing what he did," you wrote. Putin said of Snowden, "He shouldn’t have done it (leaked secrets). My view is that what he did was wrong."