Sweden's Watergate 179
An anonymous reader writes, "Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party's internal network has been illegally accessed several hundred times over a period of several months. Party treasurer Tommy Ohlstroem describes the incident as "wide-scale and systematic." Computer security company Sentor's investigation has revealed intrusions originating from computers belonging to Sweden's Liberal Party, and with the upcoming election in only two weeks many commentators are already describing this as Sweden's Watergate (Swedish only). An employee of the Young Liberals has admitted to unauthorized access, but a series of mysterious coincidences in the form of exceptionally well timed public announcements by the Liberal Party suggests the involvement of more than one person."
Re:Explanation of 'swedish liberal' (Score:1, Interesting)
As always, Germany is just a step ahead... (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems like a borrowed idea (Score:5, Interesting)
The internal server of the Socialist Party turned out to be a password protected http server containing some upcoming promotional campaign pictures, with some trivial password like hsp:redflower. The pass somehow leaked and thousands of other people viewed it, myself included, before it became a "scandal" and "proof of hacking" and "ServerGate".
I hope the swedish parties are more grown up than to play stupid games like that and I hope the swedish public is more educated than the hungarian, so that they can tell if nothing extraordinarily happened, just some PR hype..
Re:Explanation of 'swedish liberal' (Score:5, Interesting)
The largest party in the opposing coalition, that is "Socialdemokraterna" is the hackee and this smaller party in the other block is the hacker, but, living in Sweden, my suspicions run deeper than this:
*- A focus on hacking so the governors can impose higher surveillance.
Remember the ruling Swedish coalition, with the Socialdemokraterna in the leadership;
Taking orders from Hollywood and confiscating the Pirate Bay servers...
*- A very Swedish joke, i.e. an easily exposed attempt
- that shows the oppositions lack of IT-skills
(That's a head-shot in the pre-election posturing IMHO)
*- This breach is old news, why expose it now?
*- Profit!! [Sorry, can't ever make a list without Profit! at the end
A bit OT, but since we're on the Swedish elections (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, from what the article suggests... (Score:3, Interesting)
As others have observerd here, politics outside the US is far more complicated than "left and right" (hell, even US politics has more dimension than that, though the fact that only two parties have power simplifies things). Even the Canadian landscape is far different politically and in some ways mirrors the Swedish situation. For those non-Canadian readers:
Canada's federal parliament has 4 official parties, which dont exactly fall evenly on a political left-right spectrum...cynically, they are:
1. The Conservative party currently leads a minority government (largest portion of the commons but still less than 50%). It is also the youngest federal party in Canada (it has only ran in two elections--2004 and 2006). It came into being largely because of a coalition of some disaffected MPs from two now-defunct right-of-centre parties (The Alliance and Progressive-Conservatives/PCs). This un-official coalition ended when the Alliance chose a new leader (the current Prime Minister), and a formal merger was achieved not long after the PCs chose their new leader (now deputy leader of the Conservatives and current Foreign Affairs minister). Because of this heritage, the Conservative party is a fairly mixed-bag of vaguely right-wing principles. The Alliance generally represented the "far right" (equivalent to moderate US Republicans) though in acutality it was an almost evenly-split coalition of populitsts, social conservatives and libertarians. The Progressive-Conservatives (which sounds like an oxymoron to many people) were nominally right-of-centre in that they were socially "progressive" (protect socialised medicine, support gay marriage, strong central government) but economically conservative (scrap costly gun control, support free trade, outlaw deficits...).
Despite PM Harper being described by his critics on the left as "shrub" or "George's puppet" or other such nasty ways, suggesting that he and his party are nothing more than far-right republicans, Harper himself is acually from the libertarian faction of this large "right wing" coalition. Though he is a regular church-goer he is loathe to legislate morality and evasive on subject such as gay marriage (he'd generally prefer to defer such moral decisions to free votes in Parliament). This lets him get out of having to put the coalition in jeopardy by angering the social conservative support base and appeals to the populist demand for more direct democracy.
Disappointingly to most Conservative supporters the party is viewed as the "least bad" of all the parties. Populists want more action on democratic reform and more openness in goverment than we've been getting recently. Social conservatives would like more vocal defence of thier values by their learder and MPs (which would probably scare off most Conservative support realistically). Libertarians are frustrated at pledging support for large government programmes like mandatory universal healthcare. The one thing that truly unites this party is economic conservatism, and it support is not realy solid--it retains its support basically because it has acutally kept most of its election promises. A study was recently done and quite literally it is the first government that has kept more than half its election promises since, like world war II.
2. The Liberal Party is the official opposition though it has held power for most of Canada's history as a nation. It, well, stands for nothing in particular. Ironically the Liberal's are probably best described as "classiclally conservative" as they support (or at least pay lip service to) "traditional Canadian values". These values are not "bic C" Conservative (what we'd call right wing), but it does fall under the definition of a "classic conservative" (which is to day, they advocate the preservation of