Tomorrow, on 18th June, the parliament is going to vote for a new law proposal that will give FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt/National Defence Radio Establishment) the right to bug all wired cross-border transmissions without the knowledge of any other authority or suspicion of crime. The law is proposed in the name of the fight against terrorism, but what’s not said is that huge amounts of transmissions from countries like Russia are sent through cables in Sweden to get to it’s destination. Because of the way Internet is built up this law does not apply only to Sweden physically but to everyone that get their information sent through cables in Sweden on it’s way to the destination.

FRA is very persistent with their statement that it’s only cross-border transmissions that are supposed to be bugged. As a technician I wonder how they’re going to bug all cross-border transmissions without collecting every transmission to determine if it’s sent to/received from another country. Another technical aspect of this law is encryption since they most likely won’t be able to decrypt all encrypted transmissions in real-time it has to be stored, but the law proposal is very fuzzy about whether or not the information they collect will be stored and if so, for how long.

The public discussion about this law proposal was almost non-existing only a week ago when the pressure from all the blogs on Internet became to much for traditional mass mediums. During the last few days newspapers collected astonishing information surrounding this law proposal. FRA is not really a military authority that the name insinuate but a civil authority and they’re already bugging wired transmissions in some cases even though it’s illegal.

As a citizen of Sweden and (until now at least…) a supporter of the Moderate Party that urge this law proposal I’m ashamed that I did vote for the Moderate Party in the last general election and the threat against democracy they’re trying to force through with this law. This law was deferred until next year due to doubts whether it was supported in the constitution or not in June 2007 and is now up for election even though it’s still not determined that this law proposal is supported by the constitution or the European Convention of Human Rights.

Today it’s five years since I first announced this domain from my DNS-server. So what happend during these five years? Well, I would say pretty much nothing and a lot more. Linuxchick.se was bought a few months after it became possible for a person to buy a .se domain name. First it was ment to be my personal webpage, but as I was thinking about it I wanted to do something for other women out there using Linux so I began to code on a commuity.

As I was half way into my work with the site I begun to look around for women that would want to join my project. What I found out from my search was that there already excisted a couple of communities for women interested in computers in general and Linux exclusivly. I droped the idea of creating my own community that would bring all the linuxchicks together and let the domain name continue it’s quiet life as my e-mail address.

Since then linuxchick.se hasn’t been much more than my personal e-mail address until february this year when I decided that I needed something that everyone around me already had, a blog. After five years the linuxchick.se domain is finaly used for something; my blog, my personal webpage and not to forget, it’s still used for my personal e-mail address.