Swedish FRA bill (to pass June 17?) for Internet traffic wiretapping

[Psalehesost]

EDIT: Now there's finally been some news coverage:
_http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/04/sweden_wiretap_bill/

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Not much media attention surrounding it (as said on a forum, "the silence is deafening"), though Swedish blogs are abuzz. If approved, it will result in US-style draw-cables-from-ISPs-and-copy-data tapping. With Sweden's relative lack of ponerized lawmaking the past years, I suppose it was about time for us to catch up. ;)

A main information source (all I have for an article. one of the PP forum is apparently also slashdotting it, which might succeed) is the English blog of the Pirate Party's leader, who had a taped conversation (in Swedish) with Anders Wik, former 2nd in command of the FRA.

_http://english.rickfalkvinge.se/2008/05/25/swedish-nsa-to-wiretap-all-phone-internet/
From this first entry:

On my Swedish blog, I’m just running a pull-down-their-pants series on how the national security agencies have been violating the Swedish Constitution for several years, with the most damning evidence yet to be presented.

The context is the fact that a bill in the Swedish Parliament will mandate the national security agency (FRA, Försvarets Radioanstalt, translates roughly to Radio Agency of the Defensive Forces) to wiretap all phone calls and all Internet communications that happen to cross one of about 20 key points in the national infrastructure, typically placed along the Swedish borders.

All communications will be screened in real time according to automatic criteria. All of it. The communications that match will be automatically saved for manual inspection. These criteria are known only to the FRA and to an equally secret political oversight board, and will be changing constantly depending on what the FRA wants to find.

What this does is to change the default from “you have a right to privacy” to “all your private communications is always wiretapped”. The only difference between this and when the East German security agency Stasi opened all letters and selected some of them for closer inspection, depending on a number of criteria, is that the capacity and scale of this system is immensely larger.

The way it looks now, this bill will pass in a vote on June 17. The parties have put so much prestige into passing this bill they can’t back down without crashing hard.

<snip>

In my last post, I wrote that I am in possession of a covert recording with a very senior intelligence official, who - during our conversation - said outright that the FRA duties are in violation of the constitution. The full weight of this recording won’t be recognized until the identity of the official is revealed, which I will do on May 31, revealing it here and on my Swedish blog at 15:00 CET (13:00 UTC). But as a teaser, I will provide a transcript of the covert recording of my conversation with this official, whom I will call Pseudo Nonymousson for now.

As a brief background, the European Convention on Human Rights is explicitly referenced in the Swedish Constitution, and as such, part of the Constitution itself. Our first conversation was about a year ago, when we were discussing conspiracy theorists, and both sighing heavily about them (there were plenty of rumors flying about the intelligence agencies even then, and I was amazed at the amount of conspiracy theories directed at me and the leadership of the Pirate Party). “You know“, I said, “there are some people who even believe you have been wiretapping phonecalls and internet traffic all along, and this bill is just going to legalize it.”

“No, no,” he said, “we don’t eavesdrop on wires. We eavesdrop on satellite traffic. We’ve done that since 1976. That’s in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights and the Constitution.”

…

…what did he just say?…

<snip>

I repeat what I’ve said my Swedish blog posts:

The normal thing to happen when felonious organized crime has been going on at the administration and authority level for decades is not to change the law to make the actions legal, and then pretend it’s raining. The normal and expected would be to immediately cease the unlawful activities and bring the responsible criminals to justice.

<snip>

_http://english.rickfalkvinge.se/2008/06/04/more-on-the-ubiquitous-wiretapping-bill/
And from the second:

There is a lot of debate in Sweden right now. My exposing a very senior intelligence official this Saturday, who stated - on tape - that the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill legalized the agency’s existing mission, caused the Swedish blogosphere to detonate like a barrel of overheated thermite. Print media, though, hasn’t said anything apart from brief mentions in a few editorials. I’ve never seen a discrepancy like it.

Unfortunately, there’s very few posts in English on the matter. So I thought I’d provide a comprehensive summary.
Key points of the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill

The bill’s name is en anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet, translating roughly to a better adapted defence intelligence gathering. Key points of the bill:

* At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much - if not most - domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.
* This affects all Internet traffic and all telephony traffic, meaning web surfing, e-mail, phone, and fax are affected, to mention but a few.
* The FRA will scan all traffic in real time according to about 250,000 search criteria. The traffic that matches will be automatically saved for manual intelligence analysis. This obviously takes a lot of computing power. We don’t know the exact extent of FRA’s computing power, but we do know that they have the world’s fifth most powerful computer, in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.
* “Customers” that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs).
* The political administration may order (not request, but order) a political wiretapping to catch communications they are interested in.
* Major businesses will also get access to the wiretapping grid, but will have to go through an authority.
* The bill specifically allows for singling out Swedish people for specific wiretapping, although only under certain qualifiers.
* The mandate for the agency’s own intelligence gathering is broadened from “external military threats” to “external threats”, which are exemplified as international crime; trafficking in drugs, weapons, or people; migration movements; religious or cultural conflicts; environmental imbalances and threats; raw materials shortages; and currency speculation. More examples are listed.

<snip>

Timeline of the bill

<snip>

The next vote on the since-unchanged bill is due June 17, 2008. From the talk of the MPs, votes are going to be strictly along party lines again, and the bill thus currently has a majority support. However, MPs are extremely edgy about this bill and many simply do not want it to pass, but are under immense pressure from their respective parties. In the 14 days remaining, the right catalyzing event can trigger a massive defection from party lines. I thought my revealing that the FRA had fully knowingly ignored the constitution in its existing wiretapping would be such an event, but it was not enough — print media didn’t cover it. It takes media pressure. Politicians are extremely sensitive to media pressure, especially the international kind.

It only takes one international reporter to start a flood. It’s quite possible that you are that reporter.

<snip>