Mass-bugging of Internet and phone without any suspicion of crime seems to be reality in Sweden
Early this day when the controversial law that would enable FRA (Försvarets Radioanstalt/National Defence Radio Establishment) to bug every telephone call and Internet activity cross-border the newspapers are predicting the law proposal to go through in the election. Unfortunately the most enthusiastic person in the parliament against the law seems to have given up and in the evening he made a statement that he would accept the law if some changes were made.
These changes included that Datainspektionen (The Swedish Data Inspection Board) will review FRAs work until 2011 and a committee of people from the parliament to controll FRAs activities from outside. Both Datainspektionen and the committee will be working out of a personal integrity perspective. At this point it seems like these small changes will make bugging of everyone in Sweden a reality even though it’s still not sure that this law is supported by the constitution or the European Convension of Human Rights.
The people have spoken on this matter, there are hundreds of blogs out there bringing up the subject and I still haven’t found anyone that speaks for the law. It’s been awfully quite around this law proposal up until a few days ago when blogs discussing the subject begun to pop up everywhere and in a matter of a day this law proposal went from coldest cold to super hot and every newspaper wrote about it of the front page. Earlier today I heard that Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter both had 13 (thirteen!) articles about the law proposal and FRA.
What would have happend if all these people didn’t write about it on there blogs? Would the newspapers even write about it so everyone could know what was going on? This law was supposed to be quietly forced through without to much attention ’cause they knew the people wouldn’t approve. Take a stand for the people and protect the legal security and personal integrity by voting against this law proposal.