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Wiretapping Bill Passes Swedish Parliament, 143 to 138
Assar Bruno Boveri writes "Swedish lawmakers came down in favour of a fiercely debated surveillance bill in a vote at the Riksdag on Wednesday evening. Despite some cosmetic changes, Sweden's proposed surveillance law is still a monster, writes Pär Ström from the independent New Welfare Foundation." The Swedish newspaper DN (in Swedish; translations welcome) compares the implications of the proposed law with activities carried out by East Germany's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (STASI).
Actually not. This bill was originally created by the previous Social Democrat administration (which was supported by the Green Party and the Left Party), while the current administration voted against the bill in parliament. Pretty quickly after gaining being voted into power, the current administration resurrected the scrapped social democrat proposal as their own, and put it before parliament. The opposition (the previous administration) used a law that enabled them to defer a decision for one year, and voted against the proposal today.
The only reason for the opposition's no-vote seem to be that they would prefer to vote it into law when they are in power themselves.
There is no constitutional court in Sweden. The law can be tried in the European Court of Justice though. So if the law, as has been claimed, violates the European Convention it can be still be overturned.
Also the left party and the green party wants to rip up the law when power shifts (the right-wing government isn't very popular right now and this isn't going to make them any more popular), the question is if the social democrats will agree to that.
This is truly the worst behaviour of any Swedish government I've seen yet. The government didn't really have any arguments for the law, just the general "The terriorists are coming to get you" propaganda.
To add to that, the law was voted to go back to committe this morning, and by nightfall, the "new" law, with minor modifications was passed.
The Left Party made an official complaint about the law and the government to the constiutional committe, but it would appear that they didn't do what they should have.
Right now there are two parties in parliament that I can trust. That would be the left party and the green party. The social democrats won't say no to wiretapping, they just said no to this specific proposition. The left and green parties and some great people up there debating against this and really kicking right-wing ass, not that it mattered in the end.
The only right-wing party where some members had the courage to stand up to this proposition was Folkpartiet (aka Peoples Liberal Party, though I certainly wouldn't call them very liberal after this), where one member voted no and one abstained.
A slightly better translation. :D
Done by a human!
In two days, on wednesday, it is expected that Riksdagen will give the swedish intelligence service the right to scan all email, sms and telephone traffic that passes swedish borders. Christop Andersson is reminded of the surveillance in the old DDR and poses questions regarding privacy.
In the east-german security-police archive are shelves of yellow, redish or dark brown files. The total length of which is 110 miles. Here there are transcripts of regular east-german telephone conversations and long logs of people's phone use with timestamps. Especially interesting to Stasi was the telephone traffic across the east-german borders.
The giant system of surveillance had as a purpose to protect "Democracy" in DDR against "hostile negative forces" and "terrorism". The threats gave Stasi the right to check up on everyone.
Since 1989 the Stasi is gone. Yet, a similar but perhaps worse system of surveillance is about to be created. This time in Sweden. For this purpose the Forsvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) has aquired a monster computer worth millions of SEK according to Computer Sweden. It is expected to get company in the near years.
With help of the computers FRA will scan through all emails, all sms and all telephone calls that cross swedish borders. Every day, every hour, every minute and every second. Just like in the old DDR the purpose is to prevent "terrorism" and prevent outer threats against society.
The system will be fed search-word both in Swedish and other languages. Further the FRA will search after text strings with randomly selected words and numbers.
Encryption, the defense minister closest man state secretary(?) HÃ¥kan Javrell in a video interview shown at the group "Gravande journalisters"(investigating/digging journalists) seminar in Gotenburg in april.
In the interview he makes it clear that mail with encrypted contents are of special interest to the FRA. Possible terrorists would likely not use clear-text naming of where they will strike and with what sort of force. Supposedly encryption applications like PGP are hard to break but with one or more computers in the million SEK range it will be possible to break everything from encrypted love-letters to journalist correspondance with protected sources. The latter is protected by constitutional rights. FRA can not know anything about the content before the encryption is broken. Thus a catch-22 is created. In practice the constitutional paragraph regarding protection of sources worthless.
The only thing required for the green light for FRA is the approval of Riksdagen for "En anpassad forsvarsunderettelsestjenst". "An adjusted defense intelligence service". Behind the inocious title is a breach of swedish privacy without comparison in the swedish history. FRA will not just search for terrorism but will also search for "forsorjingskriser", ecological imbalance, threats to the environment, ethnical and religious conflicts, large scale refugee and migration and economic cases like currency and interest rate speculation. The mind wanders back to the Stasi system of surveilance.
At the same time HÃ¥kan Javrell and the right wing politicians promise that the public has nothing to fear. The only traffic that will be scanned is the traffic that crosses the swedish border and not traffic inside the country. The problem is just that even email within the country will pass the border. Partially because businesses and organizations use foreign email-servers, partially because email does not heed borders. The email between Lulea and Malmo could just as well go through the US if there is available bandwidth.
Stricly by the rules any information gathered from in-country traffic should immediately be destroyed if it is cought in FRA's net. The problem here is that there is no way for FRA to know if the data is covered by this rule.
Further vagueness in the proposed law conserns the protection of sources in