Sweden Admits Tapping Citizens' Phones for Decades

paulraps writes "Sweden is close to implementing new surveillance legislation that will include the monitoring of emails, telephone calls and keyword searches using advanced pattern analysis. The objective is to detect 'threats such as terrorism, IT attacks or the spread of weapons of mass destruction' but the proposals have divided the country. In a misguided attempt to put people at ease, the government admitted that Sweden has been tapping its citizens' phones for decades anyway."

Not really

[russint]

FRA [www.fra.se] has always been listening to "international" traffic (radio, satellite etc), not cable/telephone. Most countries do that. Olofsson doesn't really know what she is talking about.

I don't believe this is accurate.

[castrox]

I'm a Swede and judging from the major news sources FRA (Military radio surveillance agency, basically) has only been allowed to monitor radio based sources (primarily the Russians) and not e.g. cable channels. They have certainly not been sanctioned to wiretap phones which is a police matter and requires a warrant. This is what they want to do, but there's been a massive uproar against this, since they say they want to "only" surveill international communications and technically they cannot distinguish between national and international communications (IP-traffic).

In fact, they don't wish to at all guarantee that people who've been wiretapped should know about it afterwards - in other words, this is a very sloppy proposal and they are receiving a lot of critisism for it.

They way they say that "this has been going on for ages and we are now just passing a law for it" is nothing but BS, which purpose is to make the matter seem less drastic.

Most likely, the law will be delayed for a year, debated and more restrictions as to what they may surveill be specified. Expect to see protests here any day soon. :-)

Heads up

[SgtChaireBourne]

Well, Phill Zimmerman [philzimmermann.com] not only gave a heads up in 1991, he gave to the tools to use to do something about it. According to even a slow beast as the European Parliament, you should already be encrypting your e-mail [europa.eu]. It's warning is from 2001, read and weep:

29. Urges the Commission and Member States to devise appropriate measures to promote, develop and manufacture European encryption technology and software and above all to support projects aimed at developing user-friendly open-source encryption software;

30. Calls on the Commission and Member States to promote software projects whose source text is made public (open-source software), as this is the only way of guaranteeing that no backdoors are built into programmes;

31. Calls on the Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the "least reliable" category;

32. Calls on the European institutions and the public administrations of the Member States systematically to encrypt e-mails, so that ultimately encryption becomes the norm;

33. Calls on the Community institutions and the public administrations of the Member States to provide training for their staff and make their staff familiar with new encryption technologies and techniques by means of the necessary practical training and courses;

— from European Parliament resolution on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI)) [europa.eu]

Re:Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

They also listen to international phone calls. See http://www.fra.se/omfra_signalspaning.shtml [www.fra.se] (in Swedish). Quick and dirty translation:

The communication surveillance is targeted at civilian and military radio signals, for example telephones, telegraphs and data transfers.

Re:strange

[Jugalator]

"This" is for terrorism surveillance (as always), and at least they thing Pirate Bay is a lesser issue than terrorism. Of course, with Sweden not using to have even terrorist threats, I guess it's a fair question to ask if this is not an even more overzealous decision than that of the USA and its implementation of e.g. the PATRIOT Act.

Swedish Constitution

[SKorvus]

Swedish Constitution [riksdagen.se]
2. Fundamental Rights and Freedoms [riksdagen.se]

Art. 6. Every citizen shall be protected in his relations with the public institutions against any physical violation also in cases other than cases under Articles 4 and 5. He shall likewise be protected against body searches, house searches and other such invasions of privacy, against examination of mail or other confidential correspondence, and against eavesdropping and the recording of telephone conversations or other confidential communications.

Re:Yes ... and?

[Seumas]

I am almost entirely positive that is an irrelevant and inaccurate number as it doesn't indicate in any way how long you or I will live to be. I believe it indicates the age at which people are currently dying. Not at what age they'll be dying in another forty years.

Not all that strange

[the-intersocialist]

Sweden has a "proud" tradition of big-brotherism.

Bewteen 1936 and 1978 we had the IB (information bureau, it held a few other names through it's existence but IB is the one most used to refer to them), a vast network of informers in every major workplace in Sweden. When they were exposed to the world in the seventies, a law was made saying that the state cannot register the political opinions of the citizens. This was obviously just window dressing, and the SÄPO (Security police) essentially continued the work of the disbanded IB (as you can read in the annual report of the security police at their website), if without their extensive network of informers.

The pirate bay is of very little political importance and of no risk to "national security" (as opposed to political opposition) and therefore the Swedish state does not care very much about them.

Re:Can't reach the site... details?

[nx]

This is not in reference to wiretaps, which the police may use with a warrant, but an all pervasive monitoring of all traffic passing Sweden's national borders (talk about archaic perspectives). The surveillance in question is not performed by the police, but by FRA; military intelligence.

Re:strange

[Gathers]

I can only speak for myself, a Swede who recently turned 26, but to me this is probably the first time I've ever heard the word terrorism and the murder of Olof Palme in the same context. I'd think any awareness of terrorism on my part is totally unrelated to Olof Palme.

--
But what about the awareness of state sponsored terrorism?