Swedish Pirates Stand Up Publicly To Stay Anonymous
Written by Ben Jones on November 04, 2007The 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.
![](http://torrentfreak.com//images/demo-banner-2007nov03.png "\")
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.”
What makes things even more uncertain, is that at present no-one knows how long the Swedish bill will require information to be held. The EU Directive states anywhere from 6 to 24 months. Of equal uncertainty is the legal threshold for obtaining information stored under these measures.
Speakers at the Malmö rally included Swedish IP entrepreneur Jonas Birgersson, CEO of ISP Bredband2, as well as the annonymiser Relakks, whilst Stockholm had Falkvinge, and other Pirate Party board members.
The demonstration echo’s similar protests in other European countries, such as the 15,000 that marched in Berlin in late September. More demonstrations are due in Germany on the 6th in more than 30 cities. With information like this being stored, it will potentially magnify the guilty until innocent approach already being used in file sharing trials. If the jury in the Thomas trial had been shown a record of a communication logged through such a system, they may have pressed for even higher damages per song. The major drawback with these systems, however, was pointed out in a recent court motion by the Oregon Attorney General – whilst you can identify the technological devices used, that still doesn’t identify the person using it. Furthermore, in any well planned criminal incident (which covers terrorism) it’s not unknown to use equipment which does not belong to you. Stolen credit cards, false numberplates, cloned cell phones. As with DRM, it only causes problems, without solving any.
Previously: Warez Bust: MaGE Leader Sentenced to Prison
Next: Getting Stressed Out With Anonymous BitTorrent
17 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
Massive Demonstrations ins Germany this Tuesday, too. See http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/index.php?lang=en
you’ll find that already referenced in the article, Winsmith - hit the link under ‘30 cities’
Whohey, yet another crappy EU directive! I cant wait for the next…
yet another reason why we need anonymous p2p programs.. someone who knows this stuff should develop something like a bittorrent client with integrated tor
btw isn’t there another directive that’s supposed to protect people’s privacy on its way?
well i aint going to start logging stuff, and if i were it would be in ram with messures to shut down incase of a break in or other threats to peoples personal information..
and hell no private company would ever get anyones personal information from me..
unless he is breaking LAWS, pedophiles and sutch scum..
If i have nothing to hide, its still MY nothing!
in respone to 4:
bittorrent over tor isnt permitted by the tor network operators, too much bandwidth usage!however i2p does allow torrents and does come with a torrent manager, however the available torrents are quite limited. alternatively bittorrent with links to the torrent server being made over tor would protect you but your ip is still listed on the server even if the steps to the server dont know your ip
Oops, sorry.
OMG what friken next….
http://galacticcentral.org
Download youtube videos direct to your PC, iPod, PSP, iPhone, Mobile, Mac..etc for free.. Its fast
Check http://converttube.com/
Convert to more popular format like .WMV .MOV, .MP4, .3GP, .MP3 etc
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin
echoes is spelled e-c-h-o-e-s
Whoever came up with the idea for a united Europe needs to die. Oh, wait…he did. Never trust a guy with a funny moustache.
Nicely put SantaBJ.
Incidentally, I bet that italian guy who’s commissioner of ‘justice’ for the EU has a house full of mussolini posters, for he proposes things that would even make alberto gonzales convulse.
Oh and what franklin said was:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
And in slightly altered form is on the statue of liberty as:
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Any society that would give up a little liberty
http://www.muziekpedia.com/songteksten/x/xtc/index.php
where is that italian guy who’s commissioner that such a bad one?
http://www.parolespedia.com/paroles/x/xtc/index.php
Relakks is absolutely horrible. They provide NO support and you’re likely to need it.
I have signed up for a Relakks account twice. Both times I ended up needing support as the result of a billing problem.
The 2nd time I signed up for a 1 year account at a cost of $84 ($50 EUROS).
After paying (using Paypal), I was unable to login with the credentials they provided. I then noticed that when I logged into their webpage, it said that my account was “inactive” and my payment had “expired” even though there was a record that I had just paid $84 to set up the account.
I have emailed Relakks more than 3 times over the period of 2 weeks, each time waiting about 4 days for them to answer. No response.
The Relakks attitude about customer support is very apparent from their website: https://www.relakks.com/faq/qna/#6
They say they will NOT answer any emails that do not follow the exact guide defined on their website. If these people had any technical skills, they could create a support form on their website that could collect the information they want in the exact format they require, but no, they want you to put it into an email.
Relakks sucks.
1 references to this post
Add your response