Dojan
Software developer by day, insomniac by night.
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There’s a Swedish article about it on SVT, the Swedish national news media outlet. It’s actually strangely long for being on SVT, I think there’s some anti-competition laws that prevent them from doing journalism with too much detail.
I believe the original source is this article from Kontext Press.
Edit: I ought mention that I tried, but I struggled to find any articles about in English.
For some additional context though; the American organisation that tipped off the police here in Sweden was the NCMEC, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
The police examined the boyfriend whom they’d described as “not prepubescent”, to ensure that he has the same birthmark that appeared in the pictures.
The prosecutor that signed off on the decision to raid this man’s home, Titti Malmros has resigned.
Also this gem, which is from the Kontext Press article.
If a police officer commits misconduct while masked, how do you then investigate it?
Well, it’s not really possible if one cannot establish who has done what, says prosecutor Lena KastlundWere all the officers present questioned?
No, they were not, because you cannot question them if you don’t know who is suspected. You can’t interrogate someone without informing them of the suspicion, and you can’t question everyone who is suspected either. We have very high standards of evidence, so that no innocent person is suspected.Can’t they be heard as witnesses then?
Not if they later could become suspects.Then is there any possibility of redress against officers who are masked?
There’s always a possibility, but there may be difficulties. Plus, there are other officers present who may have heard things. We always try to do as much as possible.Do you think that everything that could have been done has been done in this case?
Yes, that’s my opinion at least. I stand by my decision and believe I’ve done what can be done.
I can’t help but read this as; it’s perfectly okay to break into a person’s home in the middle of the night, assault them, and take them away from their home without informing them of where they’re going or why, but you can’t possibly accuse a police officer of misconduct; that requires a lot of proof which is magically unobtainable.
I concur with this. Any Chromium based browser is still under the chokehold of Google. A great example is Manifest V3 being forced on all Chromium browsers. Honestly, Google controlling such a significant browser marketshare should be a worry to more peoople. To a lot of people they are people’s access to the internet, via Google Search, and they also control people’s window to the internet, via Chromium.
In short; Google by and large is the internet, meaning they can do whatever hell they please and there’s not much in the way to stop them.
I think what ultimately made me realise how fucked up things had truly gotten, was an article I read a few years ago.
A man had been assaulted by masked police in his sleep, beaten, and then taken to interrogation, where he sat for hours without really knowing what the hell was going on, until they finally started giving him information. When they finally showed him evidence, it turned out that they had gotten it completely wrong.
This “evidence” in question were pictures of him shagging his boyfriend. The police had gotten it from some American organisation, and then just acted on it, believing that he was holding a minor hostage and raping him. He wasn’t; his boyfriend, the “minor” in question is in his 30s.
Some American organisation skimmed through his Yahoo mail, sent the photos to Swedish law enforcement, who promptly sent out a group of masked thugs they later weren’t able to identify or punish, assaulted an innocent man, and essentially kidnapped him, all legally. No justice was ever meted out for this either, the man, his mother, and the boyfriend no longer felt safe in Sweden, and they’ve all moved abroad.
Does all this privacy infringement lead to criminals getting punished? Oh yeah I’m positive they do it does, just like stop and frisk probably caught some criminals too, but not without violating over 80% of the people stopped that were completely innocent regular people.
That’s not a price we should be so eager to pay.
Laws and such depend on where you live, of course. Here in Sweden if your school publicly posts photos of you and you wish to have them taken down, they’re obliged to do so. That was the case during PUL, which the GDPR superceded a while ago. I’d assume something similar should apply for you even if you’re not in Europe. The school doesn’t own your image, and has no right to use it if you don’t want them to.
It can be withdrawn in other cases too. If you agree to a medical procedure but change your mind, you can withdraw consent. If you enter intimate relations with someone but wish for that to stop, you can withdraw your consent. If consent to someone borrowing your car, but find that they’re not doing so responsibly, you can withdraw consent.
It’s all fairly normal. Your easiest avenue to have the photos removed would be to just ask the school. “Hi, I saw you posted photos of me on Instagram and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. Would it be at all possible to have them removed, or crop me out, please?”
I’ve always hated having my photos taken, so when schools organised that kind of thing I was always adamantly against being in them. Apart from some “oh come on!” and “it’ll be a nice memory!” they’ve always respected it.
I’d say there’s more to it than just convenience though. It’s not just bureaucracy but literally everything makes use of BankID. If I need to log on to my landlord’s portal to report a problem or check some info, I need to use BankID to access it. Of course I can report the problem elsewhere, and obtain that info by calling or mailing them, but it’s not the default. Everything here is defaulting to a digital way of doing it.
Say I need to pick up a parcel at the local post office. I just open the app, verify with BankID, scan a QR code, and wait for the robot to fetch my parcel. I’m in and out in the span of 30 seconds or so. If someone without a way of identifying themselves digitally need to pick up a parcel, they’ll need to get in the queue, give the clerk the shipment ID (usually just the 4 last digits), show the clerk identification, just for them to print a QR label to scan at the robot. Our local post office, like most post offices nowadays really, is inside a grocery store. In the case of this particular one it’s a separate checkout, shared with gambling and the café, it’s not busy all the time so it might not take much longer, but sometimes you have to wait 10-15 minutes because of people buying baked goods, hotdogs, and scratch cards. In lots of other stores the post shares a queue with the regular grocery checkout, so even if you’re just after a parcel you’ll have to line up with people there for their regular groceries.
When I visited the U.S. back in 2019, one of the things I noticed was how everything was very much designed with the idea that you’d be in a car, pretty much all the time. Sure things were walkable, but everything was spaced great distances apart, and everything had massive parking lots. It was very obvious that cars were the default mode of transport, even if you were just going to the nearby grocery store.
That’s what being a non-digital-denizen is like here. You can get things done, but it’ll take lots more time, and you’ll often have to explain why you can’t do something the “normal” way, because here the digital way very much is the default way.
There are other services apart from BankID, like Freja e-ID, and I think one or two more, but not all services support them. Exceedingly few do, I’d say. BankID kind of has a monopoly by virtue of being the first out the door with it back in 2003. I personally think the government should take control over BankID, because it’s become such an integral part to our societal infrastructure that it makes no sense for private entities to have full control over it.
You don’t necessarily need a smartphone. This system has been around since like 2003 I believe, back then you needed a Windows PC.
Everything becomes much more roundabout and trickier to navigate. You actually need two, technically three things:
- A Swedish social security ID, they are shaped like YYYYMMDD-XXXX, or just YYMMDD-XXXX.
- An account with a Swedish bank.
- A BankID certificate issued by said bank.
My roomie is German, and he doesn’t have his Swedish social security ID yet, but rather a “coordination ID”, it’s basically an interim ID that looks almost identical only the date of birth has had 60 (I think) added to it. So say he’s born 15th of August 1996 it’d be 19967515-2345. The last 4 digits are semi-random. Used to be based on gender and area you were born, but they scrapped the area bit, so now the first digit is an even number if it belongs to a man, or an uneven if it belongs to a woman. This applies to trans people too, provided they ask to have their number changed. Genderfluidity is not taken into account though, it’s a binary system.
You cannot use BankID with a coordination ID, and very few people know what a coordination ID actually is, so often people assume that it’s been misspelled or systems that have a built in validator don’t work with it properly.
This has translated to him having to jump through lots of hoops to get things working. I think we visited his bank five times before he was even allowed to open an account, even though the law states that anyone is allowed to open one unless the bank has a good reason to suspect illegal activity. Any time he’s had to do any sort of governmental thing it’s taken weeks to be processed, usually a lot of phone calls and mailing is involved too.
He studied to become a truck driver, and everything about that was incredibly roundabout for him. For any other person with a BankID, it basically looked like this
- Go to trafikverket
- Register for a test by logging in via BankID (no sign-up necessary)
- Do test in-person
- Receive results digitally, and certificate by post
For him it was basically
- Instructor calls Trafikverket
- Get a form posted to fill in
- Get form processed (takes a couple of weeks)
- Do test
- Explain that yes, his coordination ID is infact not misspelled
- Wait for results
- Pester instructor for results
- Instructor pesters Trafikverket
- Back and forth for weeks and even months before certificate is given out
Now repeat that for like half a dozen certificates. For a few months into his actual time working he wasn’t allowed to drive forklifts, because after nine months they still hadn’t issued his card. Things didn’t really kick into gear until his boss called and yelled at his school.
Elderly people, and people without access to smartphones likely use autogiro to pay their bills, this basically means that they register a bill as a recurring payment, and then that’s automatically pulled from your account on the payment date. I just have bills dumped into my bank and then I can pick and choose as I wish. On the odd occasion I’m sent a bill on the post, I just use my bank’s app to scan it and pay.
There are still “analogue” ways of doing things, but 99% of the time when you make contact with a governmental institution they’ll first ask you to just do it via their website, and if you ask for forms, they’ll let you know that you can print them on their website. My first trip to the employment office I was basically greeted with “why are you even here? Just use our website.”
Everything here is incredibly digitalised, and it all started in the early 00s, before smartphones. Apart from grocery stores and bigger chains, plenty of places don’t take cash anymore, deeming it a security risk. There are also certain boons with it. For example, the chain I usually buy my groceries from (when I shop in-person that is) has an app you can use to scan and pay. When scanning an item to put it into your “basket” you get nutritional info and allergens displayed on the screen. As a life-long vegetarian that’s always scoured labels to ensure I don’t accidentally poison myself; this is incredibly nice.
When going to the check-out you just scan a QR code, and then I can pay using Apple Pay, or Swish. Once I’ve paid I get a “check out” QR code I show to a scanner to let me out of the store. There are stores that operate entirely on this concept and only have staff for stocking. This is particularly nifty in smaller sattelite communities that otherwise wouldn’t have any grocery stores.
Swish is another service owned by the banks that let you easily transfer money to businesses or private people without having to bother with banks and account numbers, you just need a business number, a phone number, or a QR code, or an app that makes use of their API.
The system works really well most of the time, I’ve never experienced any sort of outage or anything, but I’ve now seen what being outside of that system looks like and it’s tough!
In Germany you need to do most things in person, by fax, and fill out paper forms.
In Sweden for example, you do everything online. Booking appointments, renewing subscriptions, insurance claims, getting test driving permits, renting homes.
You pretty much need this software called BankID, owned by the banks, which is used to verify your identity. It’s used literally everywhere.
If I need to pick up a parcel at the local post office, I’ll use the PostNord app to pull up a QR code and validate myself via BankID, then I scan the code at the robot which then fetches the parcel for me.
Cash isn’t really dying out here, it’s pretty much dead. Grocery stores still take cash but plenty of businesses don’t. Buses in my town stopped taking cash all over a decade ago. Even the bakery refuses cash. It’s viewed as a safety thing; if the bakery gets robbed what are they going to take? The massive appliances? Flour?
It already has gone wrong.
There’s a story about a gay couple here in Sweden. One of the men lived with his mother.
One morning, around 3-4AM I think, a group of masked men went into his apartment and woke him up violently. They physically abused him, before they took him away.
Eventually he was taken to an interrogation room where he was questioned about a child he had supposedly sexually assaulted.
At some point they showed him pictures of him and this purported child, only said child was his very much adult, twink-ass boyfriend.
He and his boyfriend had shared the images with one another over a chat service, like Kik or something, which some American organisation had gotten their hands on, and then forwarded to Swedish police.
Swedish police then swatted him, and when they stood there with egg on their face the investigation was dropped. No repercussions for the police. None of the people who brutally assaulted the man got any sort of punishment, because he wasn’t able to identify any of them, since they were masked and he shockingly didn’t have X-ray vision, and the police had magically lost all records of who they sent out to bring him in.
Thinking back on this still fills me with rage. I’ve always thought our police were fairly chill and approachable, nothing like the gun toting cowards in the US, but no. It seems like ACAB holds true everywhere.
following these standards as best they can
This is precisely why I want a unified web. I hate adding flags for support and testing across different systems. It’s a massive bother, and ultimately means you’ll test one platform and just hope for the best on the rest because that’s what you have time for.
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
I’ve always been a proponent of unifying the internet under a single platform, be it Blink or Gecko I don’t really care. Chromium itself was built on FOSS technology, and has its roots in KHTML, which Apple later adopted as WebKit, and Google used and made Blink.
The problem I see is when a single company has such a large monopoly. Chromium should be community-owned, and Google shouldn’t get the final say.
Wow you unlocked a memory in me. I recall doing something similar but using some send command to do the same with any computer logged in and on the network.
Week after that I met a dude from municipal school IT support and that’s when I first learned about Linux. He had Red Hat on his laptop and he was happy to talk about it. Very cool dude.