Big brother is following you on Facebook and Twitter
Sweden is traditionally sees as a bastion of individual rights, but on 1 January 2009 it took a big step towards big-brother-like monitoring of international phone calls, e-mail and internet traffic.
All of the parties in the ruling government coalition were in favor of the sweeping data tracking measures included in the FRA Law. Interestingly enough every single Swedish political party’s youth organization has taken a position against the law. No wonder the Pirate party is quickly gaining followers from various youth groups with its anti-FRA stance as a centerpiece of their platform.
The FRA law allows supercomputers to scan all cross-border internet traffic in real time for trigger words and phrases. Once a trigger word, topic, name or phrase is identified, the communications will be reviewed in more detail and investigated further by Swedish electronic security service FRA (Försvarets radioanstalt). Electronic data monitoring has been introduced in Sweden like in other countries as part of anti-terrorist measures. Civil rights activists are concerned that this kind of monitoring may be used significantly broader than just for identifying terrorists, but also to find other potential violations such as software piracy, or to monitor any individual, group or religion’s activities for any reason.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been speaking out internationally against the growing proliferation of such measures. EFF this month filed a lawsuit entitled Jewel v. NSA over Obama administrations refusal to turn over oversight records related to social network surveillance. EFF described the allegations on its website as follows:
Evidence in the case includes undisputed documents provided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA. That same evidence is central to Hepting v. AT&T, a class-action lawsuit filed by EFF in 2006 to stop the telecom giant’s participation in the illegal surveillance program.
Running for President, at that time Senator Obama announced that there was:
little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.
Now, in response to EFF’s Freedom of Informational Act demand for disclosure, President Obama’s administration has cited immunity and a “state secrets” exemption in refusing to turn over the records. EFF now seeks to have a federal judge to review the records in camera to determine if illegal surveillance of Americans has been carried out.
The program is reminiscent of the Department of Defense Total Information Awareness (TIA) program revealed by the New York Times in 2005. That program was exploring data mining that included the mapping of communications and related social networks, but was shut down by Congress in 2003 over concerns of the legality of surveillance. Of course after the Patriot Act and the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, most of such surveillance has been legalized in order to find and fight potential terrorist activities.
If the Judge forces the turn-over of documents we may soon find out the level of monitoring applied to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social network communications. Meanwhile, we continue to remind people of the often forgotten obvious fact - your online posts and pics are not private or confidential.