The Swedish government is "tapping" all Swedish citizens

I have to admit that I'm not an avid blog reader myself. Well, some blogs I read every day but I'm quite bad at checking the general blog flow through ping services and such and so I have totally missed this as it is something that has not been a big thing in traditional media for some very odd reason. That could also be the reason why the Swedish blog community has pretty much exploded around the subject, again something that I have totally missed until I red an article on SvD's site (a Swedish newspaper).

What is going on is that on June the 18th the Swedish government pushed through a law that allows FRA (Försvarets Radio Anstalt, translation: the National Defence Radio Establishment) to listen to pretty much all communication in Sweden. I say pretty much because the law states that FRA is only allowed to tap communication that passes the border but today that pretty much means all communication such as email, sms, webb traffic, IMs, cell and landline phone calls. This in practice means that the Swedish government through one of its' military departments is listening in on everything the Swedish citizens has to say over electronic communication devices (which today is everything except snail mail) whether those citizens are criminals or not. Further more, they do not even need to ask anybody for permission to do this. The law gives FRA a blanket permission to record everything 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Of course this should not really come as a surprise to us Swedes as our government has moved closer and closer to the USA way of doing things for the past years and the US government has been listening in on phone calls and internet traffic for a while now according to these two [1] [2] articles on arstechnica. com. So that the Swedish government wants to abuse their citizens in the same way is not really surprising.

To work against all this in Sweden a website was started not too long ago called stoppaFRAlagen.nu. It is a party independent gathering of organizations and regular citizens working to get the new law ripped up and trashed because they believe that the law is a huge dent in the democratic process and personally I can only agree with them. For the democratic process to work the citizens should be able to raise their voice about anything without being nervous of the government cracking down on them. This law pretty much means that the government classify all its' citizens as criminals that needs to be checked on 24/7 and that is not a good basis for a democracy.