Nokia, spying on people

Nokia, the pride and joy of Finland, supposedly one of the most advanced liberal democracies, has pushed through a bill famously dubbed as “snooping law” or Lex Nokia in the Finnish parliament.

The bill is an amendment of the Finnish data protection law, which in its current form grants employers the right to see employees’ IP traffic data. It means that although employers are unable to read the content of the emails, they have access to the information of how large sent and received emails were, to whom they were sent/ from whom they came from and when. This, according to trade unions and campaigners for privacy law, is a dire violation of employers’ rights, but industry claims it is a necessary step to protect companies from industrial espionage.

The discussion on the bill started a while ago and Nokia was reportedly strongly advocating for it, and, some argue, threatened to leave Finland if it didn’t go through. Nokia has long dominated the Finnish economy and has a market share and a share of the GDP which is unheard of for one single company in most of the industrialised world. It is obvious that Finland can not really risk losing the giant, who has been generating revenue larger than the state budget recently and accounts for around a quarter of Finland’s exports.

Critics argue that the law provides an opportunity for employers to view which websites employers visit and that no clever spy would ever even use their work email to send classified information out. The communications minister Ms Suvi Linden screwed up properly by defending the law and even arguing that employers have the right to even strip search employees should they wish to do so. Her party had to apologise for the seasoned politician, whose previous misadventures include sacking from the post of Minister for Culture after alleged corruption related to extensive financial support for a certain golf club she owned shares of herself.

Furthermore the Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen, from the same party, declared his support for the bill after admitting he was not familiar with the content.

Finland does not have a Constitutional Court, usually a cornerstone of a democracy with a strong separation of powers, but instead a parliamentary constitutional committee investigates the laws, and this has left constitutional matters largely at the mercy of political bargaining. Various legal experts have criticised Lex Nokia as contradictory to the Finnish constitution but the chairman of the committee (also from the same party with Ms Linden and Mr Katainen) supported it nevertheless and the bill was cleared.

It is certain that this law grants companies wider rights for investigation than the police forces have and is too vague to prevent others than those genuinely worried about industrial espionage from going through people’s IP traffic data. The “corporate subscriber” the law applies to covers institutions like universities, libraries and even residential building blocks, if they are providing people with an internet connection. The right to confidential information is codified into the Finnish constitution and the European treaty on human rights, and many have argued Lex Nokia unnecessarily weakens this provision while allowing companies to intrude extensively in their employees' privacy.

It seems not all is fine in the least corrupted country in the world.