A new integrity hostile Swedish law on it’s way?

It’s only gone a couple of days since the Swedish parliament voted yes to a law forcing all operators with cables or fiber over the Swedish border to send a copy of all signals to a huge spy center ready to tap into all communication.

I have barley managed to settle down a bit after the last law and have started to sketch on some post Lex Orwell business plans (More about that in a later post, things are a little bit to raw to publish yet. But when i’m ready i will publish Lex Orwell countermeasures here and on Infotropic’s homepage.) when i heard about “Dir. 2008:71 Översyn av lagen (2002:297) om biobanker i hälso- och sjukvården m.m.”
(Directive 2008:71 a review of the law regarding biological samples in the health sector”.) A quote from this directive is “analysera vilka behov de brottsbekämpande myndigheterna har av att kunna ta vävnadsprover från PKU-biobanken i beslag.” (to analyze which needs the crime fighting authorities have to seize tissue samples from the PKU-biological samples)

The thing is that since 1975 a blood sample has been taken from every newborn child in Sweden, this sample is used for research about Phenylketonuria (PKU) and is stored for use in future research. In total about 3.3 Million Swedes have blood samples in this register.

That is our government is now starting to think about how to collect these samples to enable a DNA register covering more than a third of the Swedish population!
Surely a wet dream for the state and the police, but is this level of control something we really want? Why not issuing a GPS receiver to every citizen that transmits location data to a central location registry right away? It would save lots off effort when fighting crime and also lowers the number of DNA profiles you have to check against the national DNA register.

I firmly believe that we all need to put our foot down and stop this slippery slope into a society where everyone is constantly monitored.

I started by sending a mail to socialstyrelsen (The national board of health and welfare) asking for how i can withdraw all my samples from the Swedish PKU register and at the same time destroy all other blood samples for me and my family that might be stored at Swedish hospitals. If you are a Swede (Or born in Sweden after 1975, or ever have given a blood sample in Sweden!) please do the same. Contact socialstyrelsen@socialstyrelsen.se and ask for information.

Note to foreigners, mail to all Swedish branches of government both paper and electronic are public. That is it have to be properly registered, answered and afterwards the public (and press) has access to this information. If enough people request information regarding this, there for certain will be even more press covering this.

Note i first read about this news here (Site in Swedish, let google translate loose on the page.).

The day that Swedes lost their integrity

Today i realised that the Swedish law enabling the government to monitor all communication over Swedish borders will almost certain come true. And im sad, not sad i’m crying. Crying like hell cause i haven’t stuck out my neck to do anything about it.

People who know me know that i cry, i remember crying a lot in University cause i was in love with a rape victim who due to that couldn’t love me back. Some friends back then even called me the “crying guy”. I cried when the wall fell. I have cried over loved ones i sometime cry singing touching songs and i haven’t felt a bit quilty over that fact.

But today i feel quilty, big time. I fell guilty for not taking part in this battle, for thinking that so many others are fighting this law better than me. I have stuck out my head loads of times before. Defending nazi’s right to express their opinions, for hookers right to talk for them selves and not being stigmatized, that pedofiles need help and not stigma and for GLB rights, defending the Swedish underground magazine flashbacks right to publish on the Internet, equality and a lot of other hot and not so hot issues.

But this time i have only been patting the odd people in government that where risking their carriers on going against their own government. Cheering when other bloggers did the right thing, but i have done virtually nothing myself.

My 2 year old son will grow up in a society where the Swedish government can tap in to everything he will ever communicate and when he asks me how things could end up this way i can only answer:

Among other things it was due to me, i didn’t stick my neck out. I’m one of them to blame, sorry Maxwell but i wasn’t there when you where to young to take care of your interests. Please forgive me for not trying hard enough. But some of my friends did, they are heroes. My heroes and please Maxwell never take anything for granted! Stick your head out for things you believe in, make me disappointed, make me cry and make me mad! Fight for the things you believe in, but never take your freedom for granted! Never ever!

And i’m going to tell him the story of our heroes in parliament and also the story of those center partists taking credit for “improving the law”, the improvement is polish and doesn’t change the fact that everyone in Sweden and those communicating with swedes will be constantly wiretapped.

I’m so inclined to go down to the herna on the corner and get really pissed, lean on some Czech’s shoulder and cry. They have lived in a society which could only dream of being able to do what the Swedish government will be doing. So they would understand, buy me another drink and try to cheer me up. Tell me that nothing is impossible, they managed to reach freedom and that the Swedish people can do the same. I won’t listen i will be occupied with my own guilt, but they are right. There is still some hope that this nightmare some day will end.

The only reason why i’m at home writing this instead is that i want to see the referendum tomorrow morning, follow the whole thing to it’s end and be able to explain the whole issue to Maxwell. To tell him why his parents where so upset and what was more important than him watching Pingu on the computer that day when he was two.

To my heroes i love you and your courage! Continue to struggle and i hope that i will be able to help you more in the future. I just have to stop crying and stop feeling sorry for myself.

Some links in Swedish follow, unfortunately google cant translate the URL’s so you have to cut and paste. But it’s worth the effort!

An analysis of the decision in parliament

Oscar Swartz – Liberal betrayal – connect the cables!

Josh – Is this democracy?

PS: Please feel free to add more links in the comment’s, i’m to upset to link to everything that should be here! And if you know how to fix the google translation issue tell me so i can give proper translation links.

Transportation from Prague airport Ruzyne to Prague city center.

This article is going to save you money, so read it now!

Friends are visiting all the time and when dropping down in a strange country with a language they don’t understand most tend to go for the easy choice and take a taxi to their downtown hotel.
But in Prague the public transport is excellent and downtown is really small! And even when they are doing maintenance on the transport system it’s much better than public transport in Sweden, and much cheaper!

Take a look at your options:

• Taxi about 700 CZK
• Minibus < 4 persons about 600 CZK
• 24 hours of unlimited public transport 100 CZK
• One journey less than 75 minutes 26 CZK

This means taxi is almost 30 times more expensive than public transport (This is if you go with the reliable AAA service, others quite frequently rip off tourists even more…), and what does a saving of 670 CZK mean?

Well maybe not much in your own currency, but in buying power here it is about a dinner for four including excellent Czech beer to your meal… (A beer here costs in beetween 18 and 40 CZK, in most cases less than the bus ticket!)

But isn’t it difficult to go by public transport in a strange city you might ask?

Not at all! Here is what you need to know:

When you walk out from the customs area to the lounge area with all the people waiting for the arrivals, look left (Or walk left if there is a loot of people obscuring your way.) and there you will find a booth selling tickets to the public transport system. Buy a single ticket or a 24 hour ticket if you think you will use it.

Please note! If you arrive from a non Schengen country (You arrive at a different terminal) look and walk right instead!

Then just walk out of the terminal and look right for bus 119 (Chances are that there already will be a crowd there waiting) this bus will take you to a metro station called Dejvická (End station, everyone will be thrown off!) leave the bus and walk 20 meters and walk down into the metro. It is the end stop so just take the first train down town which would be 3-5 stops depending on where in the center you are heading. Now just walk a couple of blocks to your hotel. (Check on google maps how, perhaps even print out the page.)

If this feels like a big adventure, drop us a mail and we will pick you up and escort you to the hotel, for this we normally charge a dinner. We choose establishment depending of you income and if it’s on the low end dinner is at the sausage stand 10 meters from the tourist ones, in those ten meters the price drops by 50%…

Now please help us help others to save some money. Tell your friends about this page and link to it if you have your own site! (Or for that matter use the bookmark and share option below, or why not both?)

How i hooked up with Barack Obama

Now i have received so many questions regarding “how i know Barack Obama” that i feel it’s time to write something about it here before i drown in all these mails…

The short story is that i read an article somewhere (sorry i can’t remember the link) that Senator Obama was an “open networker” on sites like linkedin etc. And since his email address where in the article i decided to give it a try. And a couple of days later he accepted my request to connect. (Btw. i have no illusions what so ever that he personally klicks and accepts the thousands of request to connect that he receives!)

An open networker basically is someone who accepts (almost) all requests to connect on social networks, this means they try to take full advantage of “Metcalfe’s law” but applied to social networks.

Metcalfe’s law states: “that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²).” In plain English this means that the value of your network increases more and more for each new connection you have.

And i totally agree that in business oriented social networks like linkedin there is power in numbers to how many you are connected to. This way you maximise your exposure to others and increase the chance that you can get introduced to someone you need to get in contact with. So i’m an open networker there to with almost 1000 connections, mainly with headhunters and other peers in the Internet industry.

Business oriented social networks is one thing, but purely personal networks like facebook and others i have another strategy. There i only link to people who i have had a (not too negative) relation to. The difference here is that information here, pictures, who i know and what i do is a much more private thing affecting me directly and my family. Not to mention friends and colleages who i connect to and meet in real life. My life rubs off onto theirs and i don’t want a complete stranger to be able to rub it in their face.

So please hook up with me on linkedin with my email chris@arnold.se and if you need to link with Senator Obama please feel free to send me a request and as long as it isn’t rude or spammy i will pass it on to him. But if you would like the same on facebook make shure to tell me why i should open up myself towards you. The same goes for senator Obama! (But in relaity i guess i would be so flattened that ill accept right away and send him a message asking for a postal address so i could send a hard copy of my familly album…)