What can I say? I am dismayed and utterly embarrassed by the new Swedish law that will unleash previously unheard of snooping of internet traffic crossing our borders. The only decent way to now communicate by email with people within or outside Sweden is to use encryption. The law allows the Swedish agencies to share whatever information they get with other countries, so from now on you have to count on whatever you send me unencrypted might end up within MOSSAD, CIA or GRU. Well, probably not the GRU, since the whole idea with much of the law is to snoop on the Russians (they’ve admitted that publicly).
I haven’t set up encryption just yet, but will very soon, using the Thunderbird Enigmail plugin and very long keys. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve got the machinery working. I will probably use a new email address, since an old experiment 5 years ago have left old public keys left scrambling around keyservers out there. I’m not sure I can revoke them properly.
Again, I am sincerely sorry for this situation. The current government will probably be sacked at the next election because of this, but I don’t trust any new government to revoke the law. They’re not competent enough know that the law is utterly useless.
Yup, it’s definitely time for encryption of e-mails. And really, considering the fact that more than one other country has had internet surveillance in place for some time, one should have added encryption a long time ago. But, what about surfing the web? That’s going to be more difficult to do anonymously.
Milan Kundera’s “The Joke” is a great classic book (perhaps available on e-book? 😉 It tells a story about a man that writes a political joke on a postcard. His life is ruined. This is in the Chech Republic in the 50’s. Now this could be reality in Sweden today.
Today I read that the information snooped will be used to exchange information about Afghanistan – with the Russians.