Webupon

On the first of April 2009 came the law IPRED into effect in Sweden, which in principle means that:

The film and recording industry will be able to demand from an ISP (Internet Service Provider) the user details about a customer that subscribed to a particular IP address on their network at a certain hour, if they show the court “reasonable evidence” that file sharing has occurred from the IP address. A screenshot (which is easy to fabricate) will most probably be more than enough. This means that they get more powers to violate personal privacy than the Swedish police.

With these data in hand, they are able to send a invoice to the subscriber of the ISP. It says essentially “pay a monthly salary, otherwise we’ll sue you. We have evidence and you can not win. If you take it to court, you also pay the costs.” Most pay in pure fear to get the problem to disappear. That is how the copyright lobby has done in every country where they obtained this right and there is no reason to believe that they would do differently in Sweden. Legal security is non-existent.

How to protect yourself against this violation of your privacy

1. The absolute first thing you should do is get an internet anonymity service. The domestic country (eg Sweden) often offer a variety of services (relakks.se, flashback, dold.se). In my experience, it is better to acquire an internet anonymity service that is not located in the own country, since it is much more difficult for the domestic media industry to recover user data from foreign companies. The two internet anonymity services that I can recommend is http://www.swissvpn.net and http://www.ivacy.com.
   
2. After installing the internet anonymity service, use its VPN protocols when you wish to remain anonymous online. When you have the internet anonymity service running, you can surf the web, use P2P programs (such as utorrent, dc + +), IM programs (MSN, ICQ), FTP and other Internet-based programs and services anonymously and without risk of being tracked or registered.
3. Encrypt your hard drives. Go to www.truecrypt.org and download and install the latest version of truecrypt, which is an open source encryption software with very high security. There are excellent guides on truecrypts website showing how to easily encrypt and protect your disks. Now you are safe even if your hard drives would be seized by the media “police”.
4. Best of all, all steps above are completely legal. It is not illegal to use an internet anonymity service.
5. Surf or do whatever you like online, anonymously.