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 ********************************************************* For a searchable list of products in the Swedish national monopoly liquor-shops, see: http://lupus.physchem.kth.se/systemet.html