EFF: Sweden and the Borders of the Surveillance State
Disclosure: I have worked with EFF on civil liberty issues.
Over at EFF’s Deeplinks blog, Danny O’Brien has a great post on the breathtakingly broad surveillance law being debated in Sweden.
A proposed new law in Sweden (voted on this week, after much delay) will, if passed, allow a secretive government agency ostensibly concerned with signals intelligence to install technology in twenty public hubs across the country. There it will be permitted to conduct a huge mass data-mining project, processing and analysing the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals. Allegedly these monitoring stations will be restricted to data passing across Sweden’s borders with other countries for the purposes of monitoring terrorist activity: but there seems few judicial or technical safeguards to prevent domestic communications from being swept up in the dragnet. Sound familiar?
The passing of the FRA law (or “Lex Orwell”, as the Swedish are calling it) next week is by no means guaranteed. Many Swedes are up in arms over its provisions (the protest Facebook group has over 5000 members; the chief protest site links to thousands of angry commenters across the Web). With the governing alliance managing the barest of majorities in the Swedish Parliament, it would only take four MPs in the governing coalition opposing this bill to effectively remove it from the government’s agenda.
Read the full post here. A similar law is also being debated in Germany. Also, local councils in the UK have been accused of misusing the country’s anti-terrorism law for purposes such as determining if a family lived in the right school district. The UK House of Commons has just passed a bill to extend no-charge detention of suspects, again. Many are questioning China’s surveillance procedures, as well. And, of course, there is the current debate on warrantless wiretapping and FISA in the U.S.
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