Finland: New surveillance law threatens fundamental rights (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Finland: New surveillance law threatens fundamental rights (2015)

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136 pointsff_29 comments

Like in most countries, changing the constitution in Finland takes time. The Finnish constitution can be changed in one of two ways:

A) The parliament accepts the change by a simple majority vote, and the change will "rest" until the next election. After the election, the change will pass with a 2/3 majority vote by the new parliament.

B) The parliament deems that the change is urgent by at least a 5/6 majority vote. Then the change will be voted upon and will pass with a 2/3 majority vote.

Finland is not “changing the constitution“. Not yet, at least. Such a change has been _proposed_ by a group appointed by the ministry of justice, and is now being _discussed_ in public. None of the above steps to actually change the constitution has taken place yet. I find it unlikely that a 2/3 majority vote for a change like this can be achieved with the currently elected parliament.

The annoying thing I find about the news coverage about this is that they make it sound like it's already decided. We're seeing headlines to the tune of ”here are the new wiretap rights for Finnish Security Service”. It is not decided yet.

Thanks for the more sane perspective on this.

I was like "wtf" when I read this article. As a Swedish citizen, the article got me a bit worried.

Unfortunately, this "wtf" should cover a large part of the news we read.

However, here the thing is that the discussion in Finland is about "following the Swedish model", because in Sweden the FRA (Försvarens Radioanstalt) has permission to do things that the corresponding Finnish authorities would like to get.

Yep, and before the "FRA law" they were almost certainly already doing the same thing, just illegally.

No need, they probably just have to call their friendly neighbour.

Yes, if this proposal were to go through (hopefully not), it would give Finnish authorities roughly similar powers that the corresponding Swedish ones already have.

One can always hope that the Finns will reject this dumbfounded proposal, giving an example to the Swedes to repeal their corresponding law.

Finnish traffic goes through Sweden so this is already happening

That is all true, but it is also good to have a sense of urgency to find and root out tendencies to a surveillance state: Did this originate in trans-national connections, seeking to normalize mass surveillance? Did this originate with individuals? Who and why? Is there an agenda that's been institutionalized? Otherwise this is guaranteed to come back, over and over, seeking an opening to become established in law and much harder to reverse or thwart.

This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would be datacenters, which would benefit from the existing factory halls and cooling, climate, and possible future green tech solutions. Along with no domestic mass surveillance, no secret courts and no NSLs, this could be a great "pivot" for the existing infrastructure.

If this change were to pass, however, there will be little internet related tech locating to Finland, which is what the government is actually hoping to happen.

Also of interest are the reasons behind the proposed change. There has been little to none "national security" issues in Finland, so it's somewhat odd to see it pushed as the main reason.

The director of the surveillance police has actually stated in the past that they rely a lot on information passed to them from other surveillance agencies, and that they don't really have anything to give back. I think this is more about amassing data for exchanges between agencies, rather than an any actual threat.

It is not realistic that data centers would be able to replace even a fraction of the jobs and revenues of the forest industry.

For example, the Google data center in Hamina directly employs about 125 people. The taxes are limited to salaries, power, etc. I'm pretty sure (although didn't check) that the data center is not turning a profit, even though it probably does generate a tremendous amount of money for Google.

They do have a certain neighbour who is generally aggressive, has attacked them only 75 years ago, and is currently attacking its other neighbours. So easy to understand that they need to be very vigilant, especially with terrorist and separatist threats

Speaking as a Finn, the sort of hybrid/proxy warfare techniques Russia has employed against Ukraine and Georgia would not work in case of Finland. The closest thing we have to a separatist movement is probably some Ålanders who wouldn't mind if the island belonged to Sweden instead.

Yeah there's no Russian populace wondering wait why am I in a different country now (I think)

Or rather, it is too small to have a very significant impact. About 1.3 % of population is Russian-speaking. It'll overcome the second language Swedish (5 %) in a few decades, but on the other hand, Arabic will probably overcome it by that time too.

That's only half the story. If you dig deeper most of Russian dealings involve Nato pushing their own thing against Russia, breaking agreement, and them responding. Doesn't mean its right, but it's nowhere as black and white as it's made to be.

> This would be a big misstep for Finland. At the moment, the old forest industry & export is dying off, with no replacement in sight. A viable candidate would be datacenters

Yes, this vision has been thrown about, but they thing is, even if the wildest predictions were to come through, the employment generated by these large-scale datacenters is a small fraction of the jobs lost in other industries. And most of these jobs are relatively low-paying ones such as perimeter security, replacing faulty servers etc. A far cry from, say, the hordes of engineers employed by the telecom sector during the boom years.

Sure, they may indirectly generate a lot of jobs, but you don't need to live next to (or even in the same country as) an Amazon, Google, or whomever's, gigantic datacenter in order to use it.

Well yes, my wording may have been off: the factory workers will remain unemployed no matter what.

But converting factories to data centres would be a way to avoid demolition, and create a demand for specialised tech knowledge and make Finland somewhat relevant to the internet, which is what the government is after.

Regarding government's desire for internet relevancy, it would make a lot more sense to first gain the companies' trust and commitment to Finnish datacenters. And only then change the laws (or even more sensibly, just perform surveillance illegally).

I don't really disagree with your notion. However, as someone noted above, Sweden already has these laws in place, all the data from Finland currently (before the sea cable to Germany is ready) goes through Sweden, and their laws didn't prevent Facebook from building a huge datacenter in Luleå. But yeah, they probably would have _some_ effect.

Up to date article (5 days ago) on this from the national public-broadcasting company: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/working_group_tables_const...

A great blog post about topic in Finnish: http://kasvi.org/?p=670 Google translated version: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

I guess with Russia around the corner being old school Russia again, that was just a matter of time.

Cannot understand why you're downvoted. It is definitely a concern.

Why would increasing the governments right to spy on their on populace protect them from a Russian aggression ?

With the situation as it is right now, I'm not sure there is anything that could protect you from Russian aggression.

Here it is like with surveillance cameras. They won't jump down from the pole to help you. Still they are all over now being sold with the argument of protection.

Rights to monitor Internet traffic would allow authorities to have better picture of cyber attacks and maybe allow putting up better defences against them.

It is also quite clear that Russia is having various operations where they try to affect the public opinion for example through forum posts. Would be probably quite useful to be able to monitor these as well.

Of course, as usual, on the other side you then have the peoples right to privacy and I'm not sure if the pros outweigh the cons.

In general the principle in Finland is that we can't setup ultimate defense against Russia. We can only try to build up defense, which makes attacking us too costly.

I don't understand your point; are you saying the Finland government is preparing their citizens for the drop in civil liberties after Russia will annex Finland in advance, so the drop wouldn't be so sudden? :-)

> 06 Oct 2015

So… did they alter the constitution?

Not yet. Altering the constitution is a slow process - fortunately.

The draft/proposal is dated to Jan 2015 [1] (it's in Swedish, sorry), and it was in the works, and came up again today on the newspapers after the Minister of Justice called for a debate on this. Here's an up to date article on this: http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/working_group_tables_const...

EDIT: add sources.

[1]: http://www.defmin.fi/sv/uppgifter_och_verksamhet/lagstiftnin...

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