The chairman of the youth wing of the Swedish Pirate Party successfully fooled attendees at a major Swedish security and defense conference into connecting to an open Wi-Fi network that he controlled—as a way to protest mass digital surveillance.

According to The Local, an English-language newspaper in Sweden, Gustav Nipe watched earlier this week as around 100 politicians, military officers and journalists logged into a network called “Open Guest” and proceeded to search for various non-work-related things including “forest hikes” and monitor eBay auctions.

Previously Nipe was involved in the Pirate Party’s efforts to create its own ISP in 2010, and founded the Church of Kopimism, which was formally recognized by Swedish tax authorities in 2011.

In a Swedish-language statement (Google Translate) published by Nyheter24.se, Nipe wrote:

All traffic that occurred via our wireless network has been logged. By having access to the logs of Internet activity, we can among other things, see what websites have been visited.

The metadata analysis allows us to draw conclusions about who used our network. To go into general and frequently visited websites [such as Swedish newspaper] aftonbladet.se does not say much about the user in question, but if the person then additionally connects to [a government mail server X] and [then is looking at] websites about City Y—the number of candidates shrinks rapidly to a few possible.

…

That we can identify government officials, journalists and politicians with the help of a wireless network and their less thoughtful use of online services demonstrates the tremendous power available in controlling the Internet.