Poor British bastards

Apparently the Brits will be getting "their own Reinfeldt" according to Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt himself.

What have those poor bastards done to deserve even more surveillance and oppression?

Bono says: Look to China!

U2 front man and tax refugee Bono comes out of the closet as a firm believer in China style censorship (more comments on this article are here, here, here and here). Who would have thought a guy who's based his image over the last decade on being some kind of human rights activist, would do a U-turn like this and embrace oppression:

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content.

Sure, why not. Let's make a "noble effort" to monitor all user's Internet traffic (and just forget about details like multiple computers sharing the same ip address and other minor details...) in order to protect an outdated industry refusing to renew itself and instead demanding special legislation in order to keep the profit growing. Yeah, that's the noble thing to do. You complete moron.

I also love the part about the rich, evil Internet service providers and the poor songwriters:

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

Swollen profits? Lost receipts? You might wonder what was in that pipe Bono just smoked. If anyone's making profit ripping off the "poor songwriters" it's the rotten to the core record labels. So please, Bono, stop embarrassing yourself by writing absolute bullshit about stuff you know nothing about, and stop promoting oppression and abolishing human rights in order to boost the profit of a vicious industry. It's really bad for your image.

If you want to read an intelligent piece of text on the subject, go read David Byrne's Survival Strateglies for Emerging Artists here. You don't have to be a slave to the CD manufacturing industry just because you want to write and/or perform music.

Or, if you're a friend of oppression, like Bono himself, read about how the Belarus are about to handle the "problem" of free speech and sharing of information. There are some good ideas to be found there.

Who cares about consumer rights?

Swedish minister of infrastructure, Åsa Torstensson (Centerpartiet) expresses surprise and disappointment in that Vänsterpartiet-politician Eva-Britt Svensson says she is willing to knock down the EU telecoms package altogether if the Council (or "The Evil Empire", if you want) insist on throwing basic human rights out the window by adopting the completely bizarre amendment 138 that would allow oppressive regimes such as the UK and France to punish people without a fair trial.

Torstensson:

– Det är beklagansvärt. Parlamentet har varit för de flesta delar av telekompaketet och bejakat att det är bra för konkurrensen och konsumenterna. Jag är överraskad att hon uttrycker att hon vill att det ska falla, säger hon till SvD.se.

Now, excuse me Mrs. Minister of Infrastructure, but who the hell cares about competition or consumer rights when basic human rights are at stake here? Would you amputate your foot because it was itching a bit? Are you really that dumb, Torstensson, or do you just think your voters are?

Life behind the iron curtain

I woke up today and realized I'm living in DDR. Who would have thought, on that fateful day in 1989, that the fall of the Berlin wall, and the fall of the iron curtain, would in fact not export democracy and freedom to the east, but rather oppression and surveillance to the west? Who could have imagined that in Sweden in 2009 one would have to meet in secret places, talk quietly and constantly look over one's shoulder in order to stay out of the prying eyes and ears of the "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit"?

I sure as hell didn't.

Surveillance, inc.

Opassande.se has published a brilliant, and chilling, list of all the new and oppressive surveillance laws passed, implemented and being discussed in Sweden and the EU, many of them bizarrely enough written and directed by the entertainment mafia themselves, giving them a carte blanche to continue their extortion business at the sacrifice of ordinary people's integrity and legal protection.

It's an utterly revolting list, and it certainly makes you question what kind of society you live in.

Google censorship policies

Search engine Google is no stranger to sacrificing freedom of speech on the altar of mammon and censoring links to content found objectionable by various oppressive regimes in order to gain market shares. This censorship has up until now been limited to specific countries, which is bad enough, but not half as bad as the global censorship they've launched today, based on the demands of a global, oppressive regime (see picture on the right).

I've already removed Google from my Firefox searchbar, and I expect a lot of freedom loving people will do the same (you can find other search engine plugins here). Since money and market shares is the only language these people understand, I guess a decline in traffic may have an impact. Now if only I could summon the know-how and enthusiasm to move my blog away from Google that would be swell...unfortunately I don't. Not at the moment, anyway.

The wind of change

Traditionally, Swedes love surveillance, they love the thought of a "big brother" watching them and slapping them on their wrists when they do something bad. This has, of course, led to the government increasing their surveillance of ordinary people - just because they can. Thank God this mentality seems to be changing now. The oppression has increased severely during the last couple of years and culminated with the FRA law, which made people think twice about the amount of control a government should have over its citizens in a so-called democracy. The frustration has sparked much needed initiatives such as Piratpartiet.

Ben Franklin was way ahead of his time

Found the following quote by Benjamin Franklin on this blog (which, by the way is an excellent blogpost for those of you who read Swedish):

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety."

It's a classic, and never has this been more true than it is today, with obtrusive, oppressive "anti-terrorist" and "anti-piracy" laws stripping us of basic human rights and civil liberties all in the interest of "protecting the public" (as if any of us have asked for it...) and that greedy entertainment industry. "Hey, if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about", right?

Poor old Ben would twist and turn in his grave if he knew how humanity had degenerated in the 200 years or so after his death.

Evaluating oppression

Apparently an evaluation of the infamous Ipred law is under way. About bloody time you might say. But hold your horses, it will take an astonishing three (3!!!) years for it to be done. The politicians have bought themselves three years where they will have to do nothing about this judicial abonimation ("we can't do anything until the evaluation report is ready...in 2012"). Three years of repeated miscarriages of justice, of lives ruined, before coming to an obvious conclusion:

Threats and oppression work in the short term. If you put a gun to someone's head and tell them to do something, most likely they will do it. But is it the right thing to do? And shouldn't the government of a so-called democracy be protecting it's citizens rather than protecting the ancient business models of unscrupulous, multinational corporations at the expense of it's citizens?