[pp.int.general] Chalk one up for the Swedish PP

[Rick Falkvinge (Piratpartiet)]

A quick success story:
 
We've been busy lately. There's new big-brother legislation impending that would essentially allow the government to eavesdrop on every communication all the time without any court order, moving the default to "you are always wiretapped".
 
Slashdot carries the story:
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/03/09/1823255.shtml

We've been networking heavily, talking to people, organizing rallies, petitions, written and distributed newsletters, etc. A lot of this has taken place outside the eyes of the traditional media, in a social network context, just like we're good at.

Our work went so-so; we staged a rally in several locations across the nation that got 2 minutes of coverage in every news broadcast that night, but the break came about 2 weeks ago when we posted a newsletter about all the pipeline big-brother laws this spring at the same time as we started a petition. It wasn't necessarily the petition that made or broke the push; I like to regard it as the small effort that pushed past the tipping point.

If you're interested in reading the newsletter and understand Swedish (or have a decent translator), it's here:
http://forum.piratpartiet.se/Topic71116-69-1.aspx

Anyway, influential bloggers all over the political spectrum picked up both the petition (which does not mention us) and the newsletter (which is very tied to us) and started repeating the message. Within the first day, people from the top brass of the far-right liberal youth league as well as the party leader of the far-left communist party (who's in parliament) had signed the petition. Some youth league organizations also decided to back it as organizations, and repeated the message on their own front pages.

We're not given credit - we chose to not push our name, but rather the message - but everybody links to our petition and repeats the words of it, and right there at the petition footnotes is "Created by Christian Engström, Piratpartiet et al".

Two weeks later, today, editorials all over Sweden are up in arms about the impending legislation and it's starting to get mainstream media coverage as well. Some are calling the law "Lex Orwell". We're not attributed in mainstream media, but the blogosphere is aware of who's been pushing the issue and who hasn't.

Politicians are feeling the pressure and are starting to backpedal, going defensive instead of visionary.

Would this uproar have happened anyway, without our efforts? Maybe. Hard to tell. It's always hard to point at a specific action that pushes public opinion past a tipping point. But we CAN say with certainty that it's our message - words that we wrote - that is being passed around the most influential blogs, word for word, down to the very comma. The most liberal blogs, the most socialist. And mainstream media have started to pick up what the blogs are writing, and some mainstream media are also linking to our petition.

There's not a great many names on it - a couple thousand - but man, the names on it! People in Parliament. People in European Parliament. Heads of the political youth leagues. The well known influential bloggers. And a great many others.

If I had any gripe, it would be that our work is not credited. But for now, I'm happy that we have shown - AGAIN - that we can get our message across through means that the establishment is completely clueless about, and that the blogosphere at least is aware of our work. That's a stepping stone.

This is to say that you CAN change the world.

Quoting from Depeche Mode:
You can't change the world
but you can change points of view
when you change points of view
you can change a vote
when you change a vote
you can change the world



Rick