New Swedish Surveillance Draft Legislation Leaks

The last time Swedish lawmakers pushed for new surveillance legislation, it sparked massive protests from its citizens. So it may come to a surprise to Swedish citizens that lawmakers are gearing up for a second round of surveillance laws that would strip out some of the legal safeguards put in place from the first round of surveillance laws.

Wikileaks has just posted an unreleased draft of legislation that would bring in more surveillance on Swedish network traffic. The safeguards that were put in place was that police would not have direct access to the massive amounts of intercepted data flowing through the networks. The main concern back in 2008 when laws such as the Lex Orwell laws were being discussed was that a vast amount of internet traffic would flow through Swedish networks and become subject to this law.

Now, it turns out, that this legislation is aimed squarely at the fact that police would not have direct access to the vast amounts of data being collected. The draft is not in English, but Wikileaks was kind enough to offer the following synopsis of this leak:

This file presents a draft law for internet and telephony spying from the Swedish department of justice. The document was mentioned, but not released, by Svenska Dagbladet on Dec 12, 2009.

The legislation is aimed at giving Swedish police and domestic intelligence the power to automatically intercept internet traffic that passes through Sweden. After a heated debate, a related mass-surveillance law was passed late last year, allowing the Swedish National Radio Defense Establishment (Sweden’s “NSA”) to intercept internet traffic. About 80% of regular Russian internet traffic, as of Dec 2008, passed trough Sweden, giving Sweden a bulk intelligence exchange position with the United States and other powers.

One condition in the 2008 legislation was that the police should not have access to the defense system.

Wikileaks also suggests that the law would be quickly tabled and ran through whatever parliamentary procedures there are with next to no public discussion. Given how there was an entire campaign to stop the legislation the last time, it’s not a surprise that the Swedish government has opted to try this tactic if they wanted to pass such legislation when there is so much distaste for anything seen as anti-privacy. The leak clearly shows that someone internally isn’t happy that there’s been such an attempt in the first place to prevent public debate.

Campaign site against the last surveillance legislation in Sweden.

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