In the United Kingdom, you can get five years in prison for not revealing a password to an encrypted data set. Even if you have forgotten it. Even if it isn’t an encrypted dataset to begin with, but recorded astronomy noise, which looks just the same. If you can’t produce the documents that law enforcement says are in there, somewhere in the noise, then off to jail you go.

In Sweden, the government has enacted laws that enable wiretapping of all your communications at any time without warrant or notice (the FRA act). In France, the government is trying to send people into social exile for sharing music. Where’s the police here, protecting our rights? We find them in the shape of activists. Governments are slowly discovering that the door to freedom swings both ways.

If net activists are applauded as they help people in corrupt and repressed regimes expose secrets of the government, then those same technologies can and will be used in every country, even the ones who consider themselves good.

Don’t all governments consider themselves good? It’s just the citizens who tend to disagree to a varying level.

This pattern, where activists are seen as lawbreakers for doing what’s right, follows the patterns of history. It happens about every 40 years. 80 years ago, activists were protecting fundamental rights against law enforcement who opened fire on people who protested in the streets instead of being at work.

The activists founded a new political movement — the labor movement, social democratic parties — that rewrote the laws and reshaped law enforcement to police our rights. 40 years ago, activists were protecting our environment against law enforcement who were protecting corporations that polluted way above what was allowed.

The activists were the ones upholding the law and our rights; law enforcement and governments tried to prevent it from happening. In the end, the activism spawned green parties in many countries that reshaped law enforcement to stand on the side of the citizens, and not on the side of polluting corporations.

And here we are today, with a global, unfettered right to communicate, share, observe, and inform. Law enforcement is cracking down on it. Activists are defying law enforcement and giving us tools that guarantee our rights. People have a duty to defy unjust laws.

And until everybody finds the courage to do so, I am grateful and indebted to the activists who police and guarantee our fundamental rights.

— — —

Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at http://falkvinge.net focuses on information policy.

Follow Rick Falkvinge on Twitter as @Falkvinge and on Facebook as /rickfalkvinge.

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That’s not all. Google and former public telecoms company Telia moved their servers out of Sweden. Belgium says it will sue Sweden since Belgian citizens may be wiretapped without any apparent reason. Anne Ramberg, secretary-general of the Swedish Bar Association, has called for challenges to the law in Swedish and European courts and similar demands have been heard from several other interest groups, like the Journalist’s Union. It’s FRA hunting season this summer in Sweden!

It is now obvious that the legislation was a deal made between the leaders of the four government parties without full support, even from within their own ranks. Active party members resigned in protest, like Fabian Norlin of the Moderate party who quit on June 24 and instead launched FRApedia, a Wiki covering everything about the law and the authorities.

Meanwhile, the people responsible have not uttered a word in defense of the legislation. They haven’t even tried to justify it. In fact, the few quotes that were made referred in smug terms to the nature of the debate and the debaters. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said “It would be best for everyone if the debate would calm down.” Others have called your-rights-online-bloggers “spirited amateurs”, sparking even more fury.

During the time since the vote, the Members of Parliament have appeared everything from sad through to ridiculously stupid when trying to handle the turbulence. A representative of the “ridiculous” faction was Liberal Party member Gunnar Andrén who wrote a very upset internal email claiming he hadn’t been told by party colleague Camilla Lindberg that she was going to vote against the bill (she was the only member of any of the four government parties that voted against the bill and received much appreciation and media by it). His email was leaked to the press by another party colleague and Andrén was later heard on a recorded phone-call exclaiming that his secrecy of correspondence had been broken and that it was “Gestapo methods”. Dude, you just voted for a bill that allows all emails to be read and all phone calls to be recorded. Live with it!

The big shift in public opinion came at the time of the vote when the blogs, who had pushed on the issue for many weeks before the vote, finally found the mainstream media with them, and with that the power to reach the masses. Some 6.6 million emails were sent to the Members of Parliament through an online petition created by daily newspaper Expressen which allowed easy protests to the members. Göran Petterson of the Moderate Party (until 2006 a military officer and one of those in favor of the FRA legislation) wrote on his blog: “Email is a great way to communicate with my voters but then you can’t do like Expressen has done now. […] Now, normal emails from the citizens are drowning in these.” Clearly, he didn’t understand his voters were trying to communicate with him, sending him a clear message of what they thought of him and his party.

This Thursday, rallies were initiated in Malmö and Stockholm by The Pirate Party which gathered more than 2000 anti-FRA protesters. They were in fact parties rather than protests, celebrating that Sweden has become a banana republic. As in the protests before the vote in June, the parties’ youth organizations stood side by side fighting the FRA, all ideological differences set aside for what may be one of the most important issues in their political careers.

In Malmö, Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay spoke at the rally saying “the FRA bill is unnecessary, ineffective, unwanted and last but not least, expensive. The government should listen to the people, as they cannot replace us. However, we have the power to change the government.” Meanwhile, in Stockholm, Maria Wetterstrand of the Green Party promised that an abolishment of the FRA bill would be one of their demands in order to form government with The Social Democrats after the elections 2010 while Alice Ã…ström of the Left Party promised to motion this fall to give members of the government alliance parties the possibility to break up the legislation.

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde at the Malmö rally

Yesterday, the annual Swedish political gathering in Almedalen began, where ministers, parliament members, journalists, pundits, lobbyists and interest groups traditionally meet during a week on the island of Gotland. The government thought that putting the FRA vote at the back of the spring schedule would make it go unnoticed. Instead, it’s the only current political hot topic as the Almedalen week is approaching with the Pirate Party in full presence on site to further push the agenda.

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Before the law was passed, The Pirate Bay crew spoke out against it, and now they are upping the ante. In an initial response they went out putting “wanted posters” up, of politicians who voted in favor of the law. Their next move is to ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, according to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

“Together with other people that work against this law we’ve talked about asking international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden,” Peter writes on his blog. “Yes, that’s right! We want Sweden to be banned from the Internet. The ISPs need to block Sweden in order to protect their own customers integrity since everything they do on Swedish ISPs networks will be logged and searched.”

That is not all though. In addition to these lobbying efforts The Pirate bay will also add SSL encryption to their site, and they will inform their users on how to protect their privacy. For Swedes they already have a VPN solution up and running, which they will open up to international users in the near future.

“We’re going to help out in any way we can with fighting the law,” Peter writes. “This week we’re going to add SSL to The Pirate Bay. We’re also going to help out making a website about easy encryption – both for your harddrives and your net traffic.”

It’s good to see that The Pirate Bay team will not give up their privacy as easy as some of the politicians. “Trust me, this war is not lost,” Peter told TorrentFreak. “We will win. We have many aces up our sleeves and we’re gonna use them. No worries.”

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The bill was passed after it was debated in parliament, with 143 votes in favor, 138 opposed and 1 representative abstaining. Before the debate the situation was crystal clear. The four party government alliance would win the vote if all party members voted in favor of the bill, but with the seven seat majority the government currently holds, only four representatives had to vote against the party line in order for the bill to fail.

With all the editorials and statements regarding integrity, copyright and online-rights published during the last months by members of these parties, surely there would be four members of the parties that would follow their convictions rather than the party line? In fact, there were four representatives who have been crystal clear in these kinds of issues: Birgitta Ohlsson (Liberal Party), Karl Sigfrid (Moderate Party), Annie Johansson and Fredrick Federley (both Centre Party). They have profiled themselves on these issues and in some cases even campaigned on them. Surely, Fredrick Federley couldn’t let down his everyone of his voters?

Things proved more complex.

Leading up to Tuesday’s debate, the bill had been heavily criticized by journalists, pirates, lawyers, bloggers, all political parties’ youth organizations – as well as the head of the Swedish intelligence agency Säpo. Rick Falkvinge of The Pirate Party was one of the voices that spoke most strongly against the bill. Also, all of the four daily newspapers’ senior political editors were heavily opposed. Rumours had begun circulating that Karl Sigfrid was indeed going to vote against the bill while Fredrick Federley wrote an ambivalent blog post that indicated where this was heading.

The debate was intense with defense minister Sten Tolgfors of the Moderate Party showing his arrogance, ignorance and lack of understanding time and again (if the bill was not passed, he said, parliament would be risking the lives of Swedish UN troops in Afghanistan).

Towards the end of the debate, Fredrick Federley was on the speakers list. He pulled off a tear-filled act (including sentimentalities about his mother) in which he said he had to follow his conviction but at the same time didn’t want to let his party down. He motioned for the bill to be sent back to parliament’s defense committee for expanding the safeguards of individual rights. This was a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater designed to keep the government alliance together while at the same time allow the Centre Party (which until yesterday held high integrity and online rights) not to lose face. At this time, Federley knew that the bill was being reworked on an initiative from the Liberal Party to a new version that had a new authority controlling the controllers.

The original vote was due to be held on Wednesday morning and following an initiative from The Pirate Party, a crowd of hundreds was gathered in front of parliament to protest the bill and try to convince representatives to vote against it. The crowd was a mixture of pirates, the journalists’ union, the political parties’ youth organizations and worried citizens. Following the debate on Tuesday, the morning vote only considered if the bill should be sent back for revision and the vote was in favor.

In a farce of democracy, it was announced that the bill was to be revised in record time and a new vote be taken later in the evening. “I think the law needs to be re-written. It is not enough to create a few checks and balances … It is the law itself there is something wrong with,” Anders Eriksson, former Chief of Swedish intelligence agency Säpo, told Swedish radio before the vote.

By now, Fredrick Federley and Annie Johansson of the Centre Party had put themselves in a position where they could show to their voters that they had “improved” the bill while at the same time they could vote for the revised version to the happiness and joy of their party colleagues. So, what about the other possible nay-sayers?

According to the buzz on the blogs, Karl Sigfrid of the Moderate Party had decided to vote against the bill and was taken into a party meeting where 30 representatives from the Moderate Party along with party leader and Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt were on a speech list, bashing him one after the other until he couldn’t take it anymore.

And the remaining? Birgitta Ohlsson of the Liberal Party was as lame as her Centre Party counterparts: She abstained her vote, according to an interview in Dagens Nyheter “with respect to my liberal consciousness and to my voters but also to my party colleagues”.

When the FRA bill version 1.01 was brought back into the chamber on Wednesday evening, the outcome could only go one way. The Government parties along with PM Fredrik Reinfeldt had decided that this bill should go through and with the internal critics effectively silenced the bill was voted through, plunging Sweden into DDR era lack of privacy. How the bill is compatible with Human Rights (The right to respect privacy, family, home and correspondence) will be decided later in the court of the European Union where a number of opposition representatives will bring it to be tried.

The only liberal voting according to her ideology rather than her party line was Camilla Lindberg of the Liberal Party. In an editorial in today’s Expressen she explains why: “My loyalty is with my voters. And with myself and my conviction. I couldn’t get myself to vote in favour of the bill, regardless of the arguments from my colleagues and the last-minutes improvements. [...] If the surveillance poses a threat for integrity and freedom without having a proved positive effect, I can’t support such a bill.”

Welcome to 1984….

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Next week, the Swedish parliament will vote on a new “wiretapping” law that may severely invade the privacy of Swedish citizens. If the new law is passed, all email, web traffic and phone calls will be monitored by the FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment, without the need for court orders or similar authorization.

As always, one of the arguments in favor of such legislation is that it will be easier to hunt down terrorists. However, there’s a huge fear this will be used in the wrong way, to track down whistle-blowers for example.

That aside, the law is also a huge invasion of people’s privacy, both online and offline. The Swedish parliament will vote on this proposal on June 17th, and The Pirate Bay is urging their Swedish users to make their voices heard on this issue.

“We want to let you understand more and read up on what this means – and make your voice heard about this! This is a major threat against our civil rights and we must act. We must act now!” they write on the Pirate Bay blog, pointing their users to a website where they can take action.

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party is with the Pirate Bay on this issue, as he told The Local: “Democracy is reliant on the transparency of power, not the transparency of citizens. All places where the opposite has been the case – where it has been impossible to examine the powers that be, while citizens lack any right to a private life – have been really nasty places to live.”

Let’s hope members of Parliament come to their senses, and make the right decision next week. To be continued.

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