From: Mats Bergstrom <asgaard@sos.sll.se>
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 95 10:51:13 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Europe
Message-ID: <Pine.HPP.3.91.951001183508.11746A-100000@cor.sos.sll.se>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Perry M. wrote:

> I was wondering if the Europeans had an equivalent of EPIC or EFF
> lobbying against crypto restrictions there, given the disturbing news
> a week or so ago.

Europe, in this regard, is still mostly every country on it's own.
Lobbying in Brussels is not for mortals, and decisions are in
closed chambers anyway (the Commission; inter-governmental level).

Sweden: The authorities have not yet said anything at all about
where they stand in the GAK controversy. Probably very few have
heard about it. A national IT-Commission was formed by the former
government a year and a half ago, then they lost the elections
a year ago and the new IT-Commission (yes, very partisan) has
just settled down. The only thing that has come up on a public
(television) level is demands from the police of access to
decoded GSM traffic, which I believe is under implementation
now (the obstacle has mainly been who is going to pay for the
software updates of the GSM nodes). Sweden has rather strict
rules for wiretapping (at least officially) and their is no
public pressure for any change in this. On the local networks
(the swnet.* newsgroups and Fidonet meetings) there is some
discussion of crypto vs computer networking but only in
obscure niches. If/when GAK will be proposed this might hopefylly
change.

I think the basic difference USA vs Sweden in this regard is a
time delay of some years. We have lots of Internet nodes per
capita (more than in the US, they say) but the net is still
largly run by engineers (if only that could last!) and net
awareness is rare above the age of 30 (i.e. among those who
have a say).

The European Council document (posted here in full by Dave
Banisar) is certainly worrying. Of course, I've tried to
spread it on the Swedish speaking networks 



For information on Swedish net cencorship there is a 'mini-CAF' at:

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d1dd/censorship/

PS
Perry, what was your impression of the Swedes you met at the
IETF meeting in Stockholm last July? I guess they were so
happy about the new 34 Mbit/s connection to the New World
that they forgot about the rest?

Mats
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