"A new electronic surveillance law described as "the most far-reaching eavesdropping plan in Europe," was recently passed by the Swedish Parliament. The new statute is popularly referred to as the FRA-lagen, or FRA law, and is meant to fight terrorism in Sweden. It was approved by the Swedish Government on June 18, 2008. It takes effect in 2009, and gives the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA, Swedish Försvarets radioanstalt) the right to intercept all Internet and other e-traffic crossing Swedish borders. The reason behind the law is said by some IT security analysts for the Government to better fight Russian cyber-attacks. The new law was formally called proposition 2006/07:63 - En anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet, or "An intelligence agency accommodation."
The response to the Act from Swedes has been almost wholly negative. Over six-and-a-half million protest e-mails have been sent by irate residents to the 143 Swedish lawmakers who voted for for the law. This is a very high number of protest messages considering that Sweden has 9 million residents. A recent poll showed that less than a third of Swedes are for the FRA Act.
Privacy experts, private companies and other governments have expressed deep concern over the new law, which will certainly be resisted by many in Europe. For instance, Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, warned that Google will not be making any large investments in Sweden should the already passed legislation be enacted in 2009. Said Fleischer, "We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden's borders if the proposal goes through." The country's intelligence bureau will be authorized to snoop on all cross-border emails, phone calls and faxes without a court order.
The new law has yet to appear in an offical English translation, but the Act allows the following actions by the Swedish Government:
-- Interception of messages at 20 separate places in the national information infrastructure network. All incoming e-traffic will be re-routed and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These junctures are situated to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but given the difficulty in differentiating which emails actually originate outside the country, the infrastructure will probably catch most, if not all domestic traffic too.
-- Covered by the law is all Internet traffic and telephony traffic, which covers all e-mail, phone, and fax messages.
-- FRA hardware will scan all e-traffic in real time, and use 250,000 search criteria to winnow the results. Traffic that matches will be auto-saved for later manual intelligence analysis. The extraordinary demands of such computing labors will be run by the FRA's technical grid, driven by the world's fifth most-powerful computer
-- Legal users of the seined data will include all 500 Swedish authorities.
-- The Government may order a political wiretapping of any residents they believe might threaten the State interest.
-- Major businesses will also be able to access to the wiretap grid, but will need the agreement of the Government to do so.
-- Individual Swedes can be singled out for specific scrutiny.
-- The FRA will now include in its reason for eavesdropping matters of "external military threats," and "external threats", ie international crime; trafficking of drugs, weapons, or people; migration movements; religious or cultural conflicts; environmental imbalances and threats; raw materials shortages; and currency speculation.
Google's Fleischer added, "We simply cannot compromise our users' integrity by allowing Swedish authorities access to data that may not even concern Swedish activity. The proposal stems from a tradition begun by Saudi Arabia and China and simply has no place in a Western democracy. Sometimes Google needs to take a clear stance and my impression is that everybody has listened very intently to what we have had to say.""
http://www.ibls.com/internet_law_news_portal_view.aspx?s=latestnews&id=2123
DreamHack is a LAN party, a local area network gathering with demo competitions, gaming competitions and more. It's arranged twice annually at the Elmia exhibition centre in Jönköping, Sweden and also twice a year at Expolaris Congresscenter, Skellefteå, Sweden and holds the world record (as recognized by the Guinness Book of Records and Twin Galaxies) for the world's largest LAN party and computer festival.
In November 2008 the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment held a seminar at Dreamhack trying to enlist the attenders.
A polititian, Kristian Persson, left a political party just because he didn't agree with his partys stand in the FRA question. He thinks the law is a violation of personal integrity.
Journalists, doctors and preasts expresses dissent and they demand to be excluded from the wiretaps because of freedom of speech, professional secrecy, etc.
The National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) has been reported to the Swedish Data Inspection board for illegal storage of data about Swedish companies and associations in the 1990ies.
The informer claims that information about telephone calls between Swedish companies and associations and people in some parts of the business sector in Russia was stored without any suspicious of crimes, which would be illegal.
http://www.stockholmnews.com/more.aspx?NID=1214
The Pirate Party, The party who was founded as a reaction to laws trying to curb non-commercial copying, has the last couple of days gotten hundreds of new members and political scientists and believe that they have a real chance of success in next year’s election to the European Parliament. In the aftermath of the Governments decision on the new law against illegal file sharing, they have been able to recruit 600 members in only two days. The party now has 8353 members. And its growing partly because of their critique against the FRA-law, that authorizes the state to without any warrant wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses Sweden´s borders.
- "Our issues are free non-commercial copying and respect for the right to privacy. Almost everything we fight originates from EU. The law against illegal file sharing, Ipred, is an EU-directive, and soon we will have the telecom package and the directive for computer storage. FRA was not formally an EU-decision, but the intention to form a large integrated surveillance apparatus in Europe exists in Brussels", says Christian Engström, vice-chairman of The Pirate Party.
http://www.stockholmnews.com/more.aspx?NID=2294
Two documentaries about the controversial FRA-legislation has been broadcasted on Swedish TV.
When the parliament voted for the law at June 18 many people reacted against the massive pressure put on the individual, often young, parliamentarians who considered voting No to the law. As the situation was, the opposition would unanimous vote No, which meant it would be enough to stop the law if four members of parliament from the four parties in the government voted with the opposition. The documentary showed on some nasty aspects of the fact that Swedish parliamentarians are not elected as individuals but as representatives of a party.
They do not have any real mandate to vote according to their personal beliefs.
In the Swedish state television some information came out about how 30 year old parliamentarian freshman Karl Sigfrid was persuaded to skip the voting.
The director general of FRA, Ingvar Åkesson says that information is hard currency. To have access to information gives you the possibility to trade other information in exchange. This does perhaps not come as a surprise, but nobody has talked about it from the government´s office. It is controversial to talk about exchange of information with other countries. Instead they were rediculated when they claimed that the FRA law was essential for protecting the Swedish military forces in Afghanistan. The talibans hardly communicate by e-mails or SMS which pass the Swedish border was one of the arguments against the law.
Åkesson and the Minister for Defence, Sten Tolgfors both claimed in the documentary that Sweden only exchange information with democracies. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt confirmed however that it “might have happened (...) under strict control”, that information has been traded with countries that are not democracies.
http://www.stockholmnews.com/more.aspx?NID=1756
The 2007 International Privacy Ranking:
Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007
Each year since 1997, the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center and the UK-based Privacy International have undertaken what has now become the most comprehensive survey of global privacy ever published. The Privacy & Human Rights Report surveys developments in 70 countries, assessing the state of surveillance and privacy protection.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-559597
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