Swedish Pirates Stand Up Publicly To Stay Anonymous
By Ben Jones
November 04, 2007
The Swedish Pirate Party (piratpartiet) held rallies across Sweden in an attempt to bolster support for strengthening personal privacy. The events, in Malmö and Stockholm, were aimed at raising awareness of a new bill due next week.
The bill is part of Sweden's implementation of an EU directive aimed at reducing privacy, for the oft touted aim of 'security' - the security of the intangible State, that is, rather than the individual securities of the citizenry. In short, every communications network operator will have to log and store data about all of their users.
Whilst the contents of the messages are not currently expected to be stored, everything from the IDs of either end of the communication, anything to identify the type of equipment used, the time and length of the call, and, perhaps most importantly, the location of cellular telephone handsets when used.
The Piratpartiet's Rick Falkvinge stresses this last point as a large privacy concern. "We're rapidly descending into a surveillance society. We know exactly where this road leads - we've seen it in Europe's recent history. When the Berlin wall came down, we were rejoicing that the oppressed Eastern bloc would become like Western democracies. It was never supposed to be the other way around."
Torrent Freak
