Sweden On Verge of Passing Sweeping Wiretap Plan

An anonymous reader writes "No one seems to have noticed that Sweden is close to passing a far-reaching wiretapping program that would greatly expand the government's spying capabilities by permitting it to monitor all email and telephone traffic coming in and out of the country. If a bill before parliament becomes law, the country's National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) will monitor all internet traffic that passes in or out of the country. As the article notes, there's a good chance email traveling from, say, the UK to Finland would be fair game, since it's likely to traverse through Sweden before reaching its final destination. So far, there's been nary a peep from Swedish media about the plan."

Comments

Sonera moved their email servers because of this

[kaarlov]

Finnish telco Sonera, which is nowadays part of Swedish TeliaSonera moved recently their email servers back to Finland from Sweden because of this.
Apparently their customers were concerned enough.

Not entirely accurate

[j1976]

There has actually been quite a lot of fuss around this law. For example, a seldomly used law paragraph enabled the social democratic minority to delay this proposal for a year, something which gained quite some attention when it happened. If that had not been done, the law would have passed a year ago. An update to what was happening during this period is available at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.156736 (swedish only). IDG is the largest swedish news agency for technology-related news. At the national swedish radio homepage http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/ekot/artikel.asp?Artikel=1242136 you can read about finlands protests against the law. They also published news about the growing criticism of the law at http://www.sr.se/Ekot/artikel.asp?artikel=1240436 (both links in swedish).

Peep? Not so.. pretty loud buzz more like it.

[Henriok]

First: As one living in Sweden I don't recognize this description. For one, there is quite a stir in IT related, and mainstream media about this. And this have been going on for several years. The current government suggested this while in opposition a couple of years ago, and it was one of the first new legislations that they announced when they got into power 2006. It's been under debateand scrutiny in media and several governmental instances since then.

Secondly: FRA is _not_ a military organization. It's a civil autority that can be used for several other governmental organizations such as the police, secret police, military or even state owned corporations. But the name is confusing, I grant you that.

One interessting thing is that FRA operates the fifth fastest computer on the Top500 list. Most people believe that is was purchased to meet the need of this new surveillance demand.

It's hardly unknown to the public, even if most are not interessted in such matters. Swedes are pretty used to governmental control and oversight, and we acually enjoy the benefits of it. Our trust in authoroty of this kind is strong since it have served us well in the past.

Re:But will it pass?

[nx]

This one is almost certain to pass, a majority of parliament have already professed their coming yes-votes.

Party whips takes care of those who are critical to the law: It was up for a vote last year, but got put on a year-long hold for further debate (which, naturally, never took place). One member of parliament (Fredrick Federley) who was elected on a privacy platform, among other issues, abstained from voting and took so much heat from his party that he'll be voting yes this time around. At least according to his blog.

More on this from Swedish Pirate Party leader

[CrystalFalcon]

Read more about this from the Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge:

More on the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill

Swedish NSA to monitor all phones, Internet

Excerpt from first link:

The bill's name is en anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet , translating roughly to a better adapted military intelligence gathering. Key points of the bill:

• At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much - if not most - domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.
• This affects all Internet traffic and all telephony traffic, meaning web surfing, e-mail, phone, and fax are affected, to mention but a few.
• The FRA will scan all traffic in real time according to about 250,000 search criteria. The traffic that matches will be automatically saved for manual intelligence analysis. This obviously takes a lot of computing power. We don't know the exact extent of FRA's computing power, but we do know that they have the world's fifth most powerful computer, in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.
• "Customers" that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs).
• The political administration may order (not request, but order) a political wiretapping to catch communications they are interested in.
• Major businesses will also get access to the wiretapping grid, but will have to go through an authority.
• The bill specifically allows for singling out Swedish people for specific wiretapping, although only under certain qualifiers.
• The mandate for the agency's own intelligence gathering is broadened from "external military threats" to "external threats", which are exemplified as international crime; trafficking in drugs, weapons, or people; migration movements; religious or cultural conflicts; environmental imbalances and threats; raw materials shortages; and currency speculation. More examples are listed.

Re:Sonera moved their email servers because of thi

[jhol13]

Actually Finnish law required that.

According to Finnish law e-mail has very high level of privacy protection.

So in order not to break Finnish law they were practically forced to move the servers to Finland as they could not guarantee e-mail privacy otherwise.