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LifestreamThis has obviously dominated the news in Sweden these past couple of days and pretty much everything that needed to be said has already been said. But international readers may have missed it so here it goes. A primer to the pre-election scandal that has sort of shattered the fair play image of Swedish politics.
Sweden is in the grip of a Watergate-type political scandal just two weeks ahead of general elections on 17 September, with the country’s ruling social democrat party saying the opposition liberal people’s party has been hacking its computers since November last year.
Covered in more detail over at The Local:
- Leijonborg faces questions over scandal
- Expressen reporter accessed party network
- Police to question more Liberal activists
- Liberal party secretary resign
And Slashdot:
A great many people have jumped on the “bad password” bandwagon. Some because of an interest in IT security, some because they want to downplay the crime itself and effectively blame the victim. A simple reality check will tell you that if the central premise is true, namely that the user name / password was stolen / leaked in some fashion and not found by chance or brute forced or whatnot, the complexity of the password doesn’t really matter. And even if the acquisition of the user name / password would have been a pure “coincidence” it would still indicate intent, take some effort and the following breech itself would be no less of a crime. As for the conspiracy theories being floated by the political right I can only hope that they keep this sort of open mind when they examine other social phenomena as well.
