Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey

In March, the Swedish minister of Defense, Odenberg, put forward a highly debated proposition for a new law, commonly known as the FRA law. The law includes passages about allowing certain forms of “eavesdropping” on traffic such as e-mails and phone calls. The proposition stated that the material searched through will not be stored and that it will be searched for certain key phrases only.

While Odenberg states that this law is proposed to safeguard the integrity of individuals and that there will be checks to ensure this, critics are less than thrilled.

One blogger is comparing the proposed law to Nazi-Germany and other dictatorships. He suggests that people should send a copy of all their private e-mail correspondence to the Defense ministry, both to prove a point (that is more or less what the law wants to do, in his opinion), which could be a problem for the servers if enough people did it, and to be a nuisance, as the ministry has to save and file all inbound correspondence.

Does this blogger have a point? Well, I think he does. The Nazi-Germany argument is a bit hard for me to relate to, because I deem it pretty unlikely that my e-mail will be read by anyone using it like that, even if similar things have happened before and are happening in other parts of the world. I think that his other reasons are a bit better.

Bottom line is this law is an intrusion in some way. I don’t think it is very likely that any normal person would suffer from the law, other than a feeling of being watched for some. However, I think the argument is a bit backwards: instead of people having to discuss how the law makes them feel violated, I’d like some rock solid proof, or even statistics indicating that the law would actually help.

For catching terrorists, the law is pretty ridiculous. A keyword based system would be extremely easy to fool. A friend of mine occasionally sends e-mails to China. Just replacing words like “orphanage” with “O” does the trick, and the e-mail gets through. I doubt terrorists would be more careless than my friend. And if this is the intended use of the law, catching terrorists, I think it is unethical to put it in force. Clearly the benefits of the law would then by far be outweighed by the possible intrusion into people’s integrity.