Swedish MP Wants His ISP To Delete Personal Data
Written by enigmax on April 29, 2009Swedish MP Karl Sigfrid is very much against the recently implemented anti-piracy law (IPRED). A member of the Moderate Party, Sigfrid has written to his ISP asking them to no longer keep records associated with the activities of its customers, in order to neutralize IPRED. So far the ISP has refused, saying they need to keep their customers ’safe’.
Under IPRED it will be easier for copyright holders to get the personal details of alleged file-sharers from ISPs. This week we reported how some Swedish ISPs are effectively neutralizing the tough IPRED legislation by deleting records and not gathering future data about their customers’ Internet usage. Earlier legislation said that it’s not compulsory for ISPs to keep such data and major ISPs Bahnhof and Tele2 use this to stand up for their customers’ privacy.
Now Karl Sigfrid, an MP with the Moderate Party and opponent of IPRED, is urging other Internet providers to follow this lead and refuse to log data that can be revealed under IPRED – no data logged means there is nothing to reveal.
Sigfrid has sent a letter to his ISP Bredbandsbolaget, urging them to stop storing data;
As a customer I ask you to stop storing information on the IP address that you assign me. The data need not be stored by law, and other Internet providers have already decided to discontinue storage.
Since you store my IP address, I can not operate an open wireless network without exposing myself to risk of having my identity extradited to the copyright holder. This is because I can not check if anyone else is guilty of illegal up-or downloading through my account.
A letter from a copyright holder and a possible lawsuit is a major inconvenience for those who have done nothing illegal, especially since a customer can ask his ISP to take legal action to protect their clients’ right to private communications.
So far Bredbandsbolaget has refused to comply and has said that it will continue to log the activities of its customers. A request for another major ISP Telia to stop logging resulted in the same response, with both companies claiming that they will continue to log for the “security of our customers”.
“Our task is to make sure that our customers are safe on the Internet. In order to do this we have to keep records for a short amount of time, maximum three weeks. We will not automatically give away any records but will investigate any such request very thoroughly and also appeal,” said Georgi Ganev, CEO of Bredbandsbolaget.
Ganev said that Tele2’s claimed decision to stop logging will compromise the security of its customers. “If they claim that they will be able to uphold security and at the same time immediately delete records, then I’m confused. It is impossible,” he said.
IFPI lawyer Peter Danowsky is completely against ISPs stopping their logging and has attacked them, accusing them of assisting with illegal behavior. “It is astonishing that someone who claims to be a serious telecoms company wants to contribute to breaches of the law, which is the meaning of what they do,” he said, while completely failing to mention that these ISPs are operating entirely within the law.
Quite how these logs improve customer security is not clear, but for those permanently using a VPN (like this writer) there are no logs whatsoever to refer to – and I haven’t noticed any reduction in my security at all.
In the meantime, Karl Sigfrid is encouraging everyone to copy his letter and send it to their own ISP.
Previously: Why Pirates Buy More Music and Music Labels Fail
Next: RIAA’s Hostile Takeover of the Internet
38 Responses
/o/
Lets hope other countries follow.
I wonder if VPN providers truly do not keep logs. Saying so is one thing, but the truth may be a different matter. Once the FBI is breathing down their necks, logs may just suddenly pop up :)
The guy has been downloading some pr0n from the internets, that’s why he sent this letter :D
“Our task is to make sure that our customers are safe on the Internet. In order to do this we have to keep records for a short amount of time.”
What kind of bullshit is that. If you do something at least have the balls to tell them that you are receiving money from the RIAA or something for keeping the logs.
Maybe he could just bribe them like the ifpi. Or buy a judge. Seems like an easy enough thing to do in Sweden.
Arghh.
A related article on p2pnet:
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/21038
@6
teh thing about the ifpi that isnt so evident for this guy is that they have strong political power. This guy may be an MP, but he doesn’t have enough power to move governments if he wishes to (picture the 2006 TPB raid)
When all their customers switch to the normal ISPs, they’ll come around, don’t worry.
Man, IFPI lawyers are starting to sound like a broken record. Of course they are paid to spout such nonsense, but still.
need some multi-billionaires to bankroll our cause. any takers?
a broken record… records are no longer around.. we have cds and dvds. So they are as antique as that I suppose. So again.. mind briving some politicians out there and wasting more money to change the law for us, Da*n husky? oh, right, Danowsky?
Suggestion: rename the site to swedenfreak.com
ISP’s refusing to log are not operating within the law !
IFPI IS the Law ..
@ Anonymous ( Huge Lol)
i think this all issue is against the law, keeping private data for another persons is cleary against human rights
any good lawyer can fuck them up
3 out of 4 isp’s in my neighourhood support file sharing. The forth dose not probally because his setup looks as bad as this: http://torrentfreak.com/bad-bittorrent-and-warez-sites-raided-by-police-090428/
And boy he he having a hard time keeping customers.
Logs provide data.
Data can be used for statistics.
Statistics can be used to draw conclusions.
Conclusions can be used for manipulation.
Manipulation interferes with the natural progression of things.
How many civil wars does it take for people to realize that when you put a few people in charge of important things, they will fuck it up in favor of there own interests?!
These politicians can’t see the effect of there stupid new laws. All they can see is the carrot in front of there face from the big companies.
I would urge everyone reading this to take steps now to protect your privacy. This weekend, set some time aside to ensure that what you do is not data on someone’s log.
If you don’t know how, join irc.freenode.com and ask someone.
Some suggestions would be to buy a VPS in some third world country with good internet speeds ( do such places exist? :P ), and VPN all your sensitive data through that.
If that’s too slow, perhaps there’s some way of sending all your DNS queries through that VPS, so all your ISP sees is requests for IPs and never domain names (which i imagine would be far better for a log. IPs can change after all.)
I suppose neither of these things can help with p2p activities unless your happy sacrificing a LOT of bandwidth in encryption overheads and the bottleneck between your 3rd world VPS and yourself… There must be a better way…
As far as I’m concerned, trying to keep people “safe” has some merits.
Tracking the activities of people that may be up to very seriously harmful activities such as child molesters, murderers, rapists and terrorists; YES, these are very serious reasons why there needs to be logs. People that are up to these kinds of activities are doing serious harm to people and society and the consequences can be grave. People can die because of their activities. Law enforcement needs to keep track of people who intend great harm to our society.
The RIAA/MPAA are ABUSING this system. I fail to see any serious consequence of some kid who downloads some lame movie or song. No one is going to die because of this activity, nor is there any proof whatsoever that they are a threat to society.
The RIAA/MPAA are nothing but a bunch of tyrannical bullies that want to abuse and control people and by punishing college students and children, they are a serious threat to our society. I can only imagine that targeting a medical student and ruining their future when they may have had the potential to find the cure for cancer or AIDS, this is where we as a society can come to great harm.
The RIAA/MPAA abuse and control needs to be stopped. They have the potential to do more harm to all of us by stifling technology and harming the future of our children.
The only true concern is greed. The RIAA/MPAA executives and lawyers need to earn their millions of dollars. They need to maintain their mansions, yachts and private jets, all at the expense of harming the rest of us.
Everyone needs to stop the RIAA/MPAA. They must be stopped.
I hate to say it, but deleting personal data isn’t going to work. If the data gets deleted, how are the police going to hunt down child pornographers?
It’s a nice idea, but I’m guessing law enforcement will eventually have it’s say.
Hopefully one of these telcoms will take a rightholder to court and, if we’re lucky, the judge will be honest.
Yeah, think of the goddamn children. Always a good excuse, right?
OH PLUEASE MISTER that guy posting about child molesters prolly is one.
HE wants all the surveillance why? cause it actually allows the sickos to hide better. and all it does is harrass 99.99999999999999999999% of the rest of us NON SICK people.
YOU PEOPLE better realize this has nothing to do with child molesters , or they would invade and go after the bastards in those countries and IRAQNAM them. If it were about child molesters and such they’d hire more investigators and make the law more strict, why is it most of the sickos get 2-3 years in jail and a kid in Canada with bill c61 coming back gets a 20500 fine for the XVID DVDR rip and the download , that’s 12 years prison time when you cant pay the fine, and then you also get the civil lawsuits and GUESS WHAT STILL PAY A LEVY FOR THE CDRS.
the way to get the child pornographers is to go after the credit card companies for allowing those kind of transactions to go through.
I hope Bredbandsbolaget will lose a few customers. Money always do the talking.
I beggining to think that ISP’s and those monitoring ip’s think their clients are stupid. Do the authorites really think that the REAL BAD folks haven’t found a way to circumvent this petty ip tracking, for a small monthly fee you can cloak your MAC address and ip address, IF I was criminally inclined I sure as shite would have my ip and mac address cloaked, or route it through my stupid neighbours unsecured WLAN.
Once again there’s a ulterior motive which is being obscured by bullshite and mirrors.
hey #18 what makes you think he’d spend 12 years in jail for that? For a $20k fine he’d get a slap on the wrists with maybe a few months in prison tops with some CC. It costs more than that to house an inmate in Cadada
> In 2005-06, the annual average cost of keeping an inmate in a Canadian
> penitentiary was $88,067 a year. It costs substantially less to maintain
> an offender in the community: $23,105 per year, with comparable or better
> outcomes.
lol security..
the most i could think of is to mabye log ATTACKs from a client to try and find spam bombers and such.. but it doesnt really matter anyway..
im a IT guy and I just dont see what serious security protection is achieved from logging user data..
Plus, more then likely the logging can be adjusted to fill the security needs while not tracking private data.
Which VPN are you currently using Enigmax? (And why this one?)
@18 – how about by fvckin good oldfashioned police work?
Child pornography isn’t a fvcking abstract idea. JPGs don’t come to be out of thin air. ACTUAL PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED!
If the public would just fvcking remember that the whole war against childporn revolves about catching the actual PEOPLE(!!!!!! +one million fvcking exclamation marks more) and putting THEM in jail, the root cause, the people making the pictures, movies, capturing, ensnaring, abusing, instead of nuking their civil liberties for a handful of “let’s pretend we’re achieving something by trying to chase data bits”, then we’d be one big important step ahead.
JPGs and movies aren’t what are hurting children, it’s actual people.
Saying you can only chase people with help of big brother tactics over the internet is so far removed from reality(there used to be a couple of THOUSAND YEARS before the internet was invented, does anyone remember? Oddly enough, police and law enforcement was around AND functional back then already, too, without having to resort to false pretense of needing a computer with internet access for it!) that it just boggles the mind.
WAKE UP and stop using the fvcking empty excuse of “oh, but we can’t get to the real 0.00000000000000000000000000000001% criminal people using the internet, we must make it so that it’s impossible to use for everyone in order to get at them as there is, like, NO OTHER WAY durrr”.
Seriously.
FPI lawyer Peter Danowsky – Ha ! that’s rich – worried about the law – using a bought off judge.
13 – yea there is a lot of news originating in Sweden at the moment, but that’s only because a lot of things are happening in Sweden that will affect the entire internet in the future.
It’s still a toss up whether the good guys or the bad guys will win (I’ll let you decide for yourself which side is representing what) and one of the major battlegrounds currently IS in Sweden.
i thought we are only morons :p
glad other country politicians are also idiots :)
for everyone beating this “child porn”-horse to death, here is some info why sacrificing everyones privacy is NOT going to stop ANY serios child porn guys:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/My_life_in_child_porn
Every time you hear that word “security”, watch out, because somebody’s going to take some of your freedom away. — Timothy Leary
@21 … C-61 Died when the conservatives took power apprently according to the liberal MP for my riding..
Couldn’t someone just make a small app that randomly visits “every” site on the web (utilizing the connection when not in use) and thus generate so much log data (to log) that it would be infeasible to store the log.
Not quite sure exactly what the ISP’s are logging, but if everyone (or most of the users) started generating such garbage for them to log wouldn’t the ISP’s eventually run out of storage space?
Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act, was a bill tabled in 2008 during the second session of the 39th Canadian Parliament by Minister of Industry Jim Prentice. The bill died on the order paper when the 39th Parliament was dissolved prematurely and an election was called by the Governor General Michaëlle Jean at Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s request on September 7, 2008.[1]. The Conservative Party of Canada promised in its 2008 election platform to re-introduce a bill containing the content of C-61 if re-elected.[2]
from wikipedia
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Would I be out of order by saying if someone attacks your freedom or try’s to infringe upon the rights of your child to live in a free and democratic society, you should have the right to defend yourself with deadly force. If my entire life is to be orchestrated by a company (a institution in it for the acquisition of capital)then I should have the right as a human being (someone who can decide the quality of their life without referring to purchase of goods)to mentally or physically change their life! I say rise up against the various groups and destroy them entirely.Anyone who makes a cowardly stab at oppression should be willing to face the wrath of those he/she attacks. When a government appoint a judge (pirate bay case) who is an active member of a group supporting one side the government can no longer be trusted and the people should therefore act AGAINST that very establishment. That is how the USA was born…it seems they now want to be the oppressor they faught so vigorously to depose. Revolution is NOT illeagal if the laws keeping them oppressed are found to be illeagal to the common sense and the morality of the majority of a population. Revolution is the manner in which we redress the balance. If an ISP decides to keep your legally protected details you should rise up, if they refuse to deleat YOUR information action should be taken, if the effectively STEAL your right to own yourself then they should be taken to task!
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