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Sweden Passes Wiretap Law Amid Widespread Protests

By IBLS Editor

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."

Full post as published by IBLS Internet Law Blog on August 17, 2008 (boomark / email).