
The Swedish Kings of Cyberwar - kushti
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/the-swedish-kings-of-cyberwar/
======
croon
Interesting read for a variety of reasons.

As a countryman of Sweden, I think it's sad that we've been playing lapdog
throughout history. Germany during WW2, and now the US. The article refers to
much less publicized occurances, but there's also lesser stories (but
important signaling) like the piratebay court cases farce.

Is Russia up next as our masters, when they want to secure their fiber
pipeline?

It's in cases like this that I wish that the EU was something better than what
it is. If they want to enforce such federal level supremacy, why let the US
pressure individual states?

~~~
berntb
Regarding Sweden and WW II: If Sweden shouldn't have been a "lapdog" \-- which
side of the war should it have joined? With Norway or with Finland? Not a
simple choice, neither now nor at the time.

And regarding USA today:

Check the democratic peace theory -- democracies don't fight wars with each
others. (Not even USA. :-) ) So it is arguably in the Swedish interest to help
all democracies be as strong and informed as ever possible.

That said, I doubt the reason Sweden is such a handmaid to US interests was so
philosophical, of course. Every country do realpolitik and lies shamelessly
about it. We don't know what the US paid (hopefully not just bribes to Swedish
politicians, old hatt/mössa style... :-) ).

Edit: These comments really jumps up/down in votes. :-)

~~~
dragonwriter
> Check the democratic peace theory -- democracies don't fight wars with each
> others.

The Democratic Peace theory has always been bunk: even when it was formulated,
for any definition of democracy restrictive enough for the claim "Democracies
don't fight wars with each other", the number of available democracy-democracy
pairs is so small compared to thr number of pairs of countries that the
expected number of wars between them is, rounded to the nearest integer, zero.

Certain, since the wars in the Balkans from the 1990s, the Democratic Peace
theory is even less defensible than it was previously.

~~~
berntb
>> the number of available democracy-democracy pairs is so small compared to
thr number of pairs of countries that the expected number of wars between them
is, rounded to the nearest integer, zero.

There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since
WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"?

>> Certain, since the wars in the Balkans from the 1990s, the Democratic Peace
theory is even less defensible than it was previously.

Uh, Soviet ended 1989. Then the Balkan got free -- and Jugoslavia fell
relatively quickly into a civil war. How does that reflect on democracies?

(Are you defining "democracy" as "one free election, no power changes after
consecutive free elections is needed"? That is hardly how the term is defined,
last I checked either the democracy or the democratic peace theory.)

~~~
dragonwriter
> There are literally dozens of modern democracies that have been free since
> WWII, how can that be too few "pairs"?

There's a little under 200 countries now. The number of democracies by any
definition that leaves no inter-democracy wars is a small fraction of that
(though, yes, in the dozens). The ratio of democracy-democracy dyads to total
dyads is smaller (for reasons which should be mathematically obvious) than the
ratio of democracies to countries.

> Uh, Soviet ended 1989. Then the Balkan got free -

Uh, Yugoslavia split from the Soviet bloc in 1948, and Tito died in 1980.

~~~
nikcub
I know a lot of scholars count Serbia as a democracy, but it wasn't until
2001. Milosevic was a classic post-soviet Eastern European autocratic
strongman. While Serbia had a parliament, electoral fraud was rife.

Milosevic's popular support was likely around 10% at the end. The country was
governed by a weird coalition of financial interests that made up a ruling
class of a few tens of thousands of people - many ex-communists.

In terms of success as a kleptocrat, Milosevic is only beaten out by Suharto,
Marcos and a small number of others - he likely stole in excess of a billion.

That said - the Balkan wars do present another case of democracy v democracy
at war as at some points Croatia and Bosnia (the Muslim canton) were at a
state of war yet both were democracies (altho also arguably ruled by
strongmen).

~~~
berntb
dragonwriter know that Serbia wasn't a stable democracy at the time. He just
refuses to discuss it because he is trolling.

Also, Croatia/Bosnia/Serbia were _civil_ wars.

Anyway, how many free elections had Croatia and Bosnia had at that time, to be
defined as democratic? :-)

How many peaceful transitions of power had there been at the time (the real
gold test)? :-)

If just one reasonably free election is needed, then Hamas in Gaza is a
democratic government... :-)

------
robert_foss
I find the pressure Sweden was exposed to by the US to ram this legislation
through making us literally spy on our neighbors appalling.

Sweden was at the time threatened with being delisted from a US preferential
trade list if it did not comply.

As a result of bowing down to the US, Sweden is now complicit in the crimes of
the US. The global spying, the drone killings it leads to, the increased
pressure Russia finds itself under (and has to act out against).

~~~
nugator
"... the increased pressure Russia finds itself under (and has to act out
against)."

Sounds a bit biased to my Swedish ears.

~~~
robert_foss
"has to" might be a bit of an overstatement, but I don't find it the least bit
surprising that is provokes some sort of a response.

------
moogly
It's pretty disheartening to know that the Swedish press won't touch this with
a 10-foot pole; they're busy digging/drumming up the "good ole" Russian Scare
from the 60s/70s right now amidst the sabre-rattling coming, frankly, largely
from the West.

~~~
lostlogin
The west hasnt invaded anyone or shot down any airliners though has it?

~~~
chinathrow
Well, not or on purpse, a few airlines has indeed been shut down over the
time, including "by the west":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents)

E.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655)
"Iran Air Flight 655 was an Iran Air passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai. On
3 July 1988, the aircraft operating on this route was shot down by the United
States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes under the command of William
C. Rogers III. "

290 casualties.

~~~
lostlogin
I thought we were talking in the context of Russia V west at the moment and
examples of aggression (which it's not hard to argue Russia is out of bounds).
Your cited incident is truly atrocious and it sounds like the captain was a
known tool in the navy too.

------
sslalready
FRA made a deal with an entity called Krigsarkivet, a Swedish national archive
for military history, to store data they collect in and around Sweden. For
like, future research. Naturally they couldn't store this data within the
Krigsarkivet's existing archives, so K had to open an archive on FRA's
premises. Because this was for future research, the deal was that they were,
you know, just to store the data and be done with it. Of course, that's not
what happened at all. Instead, they're actively maintaining the archive,
meaning that they're effectively using the "for future research" K archive as
their own XKeyScore.

------
schoen
The most interesting point to me here is the Carl Bildt Internet freedom part.

> When Bildt was asked at a forum on Internet freedom in 2013 how he
> reconciled these two views, he explained that Sweden was doing surveillance
> for a good purpose. “There is a difference between good states and somewhat
> less good states,” he said.

I think this is from

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stDl6ovmwrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stDl6ovmwrE)

which really sets out a major set of tensions that all of us working in this
area must have felt.

------
grendelt
Fascinating read. What is the title of the book?

------
ommunist
Very funny. Russia is actually gated with the Internet through Sweden and
Finland. It is really easy to wage cyberwars, sitting on the supply cable.

~~~
jessaustin
Wikipedia suggests it is also connected through Frankfurt and Tokyo.

~~~
rqebmm
I guess that makes it unsurprising that Sweden, Germany, and Japan are all
pretty valued allies to the US these days.

~~~
jessaustin
As much as our outgoing ruler and his party have pretended otherwise as of
late, not _everything_ is about Russia. b^)

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I guess the new C-Lion1 cable is the reason why Finland is now changing
legalization to allow monitoring, intelligence, snooping, espionage and
offensive action. Basically looking to have NSA like capabilities legally and
hack anyone anywhere, just as US does.

------
tormeh
>Belgacom, a Belgian telecom company whose clients include the European
Commission and the European Parliament.

So an EU member helps the US hack the EU? Wow. I mean, why is that even
necessary? Why not just forward the emails?

~~~
koltaggar
Lol

------
hallaathrad
Irrelevant question but... Has nobody noticed this article is dated in the
future?

~~~
intarTrode
Weekly magazines often appear in doctors offices and in mailboxes of consumer
home subscriptions many days before their ascribed "newstand date." (newsweek,
time magazine, national geographic, the economist... )

Note the qualifier "ISSUE," which would hint that it's not a daily.

For weeklies, editors probably have their print runs prepped for the
publishers a few weeks in advance, with some variable slots left ambiguous for
flexibility, in case they want to pre-empt a soft story with significant
breaking news.

This piece doesn't seem to be a run up of current events, like the latest
Trump tweets or whatever active shooter incident du jour. It's really a
research piece that probably took several months to compile, edit and sweeten.
Figure the broad strokes and the idea of the article were crafted over the
summer, maybe.

------
lern_too_spel
Don't they have any editors? "Over the following weeks and months, Snowden’s
revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance efforts, and in particular its
bulk data collection program, called PRISM," has been known to be wrong for a
few years now. This calls the rest of the reporting into question.

~~~
Karlozkiller
They have? I must've missed the announcement stating this about what Snowden
told the world. Care to expand on it?

~~~
lern_too_spel
Pretty much everybody in Silicon Valley knows how wrong Snowden was about
PRISM. Unlike The Guardian, The New York Times interviewed actual engineers
and got the story correct from the very beginning.

Here is a competent explanation of how Snowden didn't understand that DITU is
an FBI department and not a bulk collection system on internet companies'
networks: [https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-
and-...](https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/how-to-talk-about-prism-and-not-get-
entirely-blown-off-if-youre-an-activist-e2a79d2cd2ad#.m6qaohems)

~~~
lostlogin
What? That doesn't say PRISM doesn't exist it says it does and suggests how it
might be used ("I imagine"). It says the info is collected.

~~~
lern_too_spel
In particular, the information is collected by the FBI and is not bulk
collection of all their data but targeted Section 702 collection of certain
users' data, as I said above.

