Here I am, feeding my headache with microwaves… On wednesday, the swedish parliament will vote for a wiretap legislation allowing FRA, the Swedish spying agency (or as the formal name goes, ”Swedish national authority for signals intelligence”) to wiretap all data traffic crossing Swedish borders. That includes all my email (since I use Google Reader for all my mai accocunts), my Skype thelephone conversations and IM, Google Talk, MSN and some of my text messaging. It’s increible. More like Chinese legislation or something out of eastern German Stasi (may they rest in peace).
The Swedish blogosphere is of course boiling with protests against this legislation, which ironically is inforced by a right-wing liberal government. The libertarians in parliamnent are said to be forced to vote for it, under the threat that they will be expelled from their respective parties if they don’t. And the more conservative forces just love it. Suddenly even liberals and moderate conservatives are all for a legislation that is designed as a device for suveillance of all cross-border internet traffic. They just refuse to see the consequenses of legalising covert surveillance of all internet communication that crosses a border.
Surveillance agencies such as FRA will allways have this view on all citicens (just as NSA have in the US with their Echelon equipment), but when you enforce a law that sais that these activities should be performed you are out on very deep waters. How can a government that don’t trust you as a citicen be wothy of your trust?
I don’t know. I really don’t know.
There aren’t many blog posts that discuss this in English, even though. Patric Fältström (Paf) has a few:
I’ve written a lot on this issue lately, however, in Swedish only. You find some of it via
http://www.lindqvist.com/b/tag/fra-lagen
If you read Swedish, you probably haven’t missed the current blog eruption about the FRA legislation, but you’ll find all the latest via Falkvinges blogg, Emma på Opassande, Blogge, Oscar Swartz, Paf, Mary X Jensen, Simon Sundén, Svensson and so on and so on….
While all this goes on, I try to get some real work done, explain for the public how to get your site in first place on Google.
