Thoughtcrime

In a Swedish bill, communication profiles, aka sociograms or traffic data, will give authorities a new lead into investigations. While politicians argue that no personal data will be recorded outside particular narrow investigations, "traffic data" is not considered personal data as such.

During this summer the Swedish television sent news that such traffic data was to be stored in a database called Titan, on a super computer owned by the Swedish surveillance intelligence, FRA. The bad news is that this database will probably not be for military intelligence matters only.

People are worried that this will affect how we conduct business and talk to lawyers or journalists. Swedish blogger Mark Klamberg is one of many who has shed light on the many loopholes. Even if messages are not recorded, the context of the communication might very well be stored as metadata and used later. The new Swedish signal surveillance bill grants the FRA, rights to copy all Internet traffic crossing the Swedish borders.

So what do I think? Here is a list of useful traffic-data patterns:

• E-mails and IP-number
• E-mail sender and receiver
  
• Google search terms and IP-numbers.
  
• Membership logins at web sites.

I think this law is a marvel of contradictions, as it mixes what should and should not be allowed in very abstract terms. By recording what is normal traffic its easy to pin point the anomalies. By doing so, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have introduced thought crime.

And that would be a lot like what people think is illegal in the US...