p2pnet news Politics | Freedom:- Locals aren’t the only people outraged by Sweden’s new Big Brother spy law.

Its repercussions are echoing in other parts of Scandinavia.

The government now has carte blanche to spy on all SMS, email and other data traffic and the sweeping measures will, “have a significant impact on Finland as the bulk of its telecommunications to third countries is routed through Sweden,” says NewsRoom Finland, going on:

Even some of Finland’s internal communications are bounced to Sweden and back.

The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (Ficora) said Tuesday that it was not known how Swedish signals intelligence would use the sweeping eavesdropping powers once the law entered into force January next year.

But Timo Lehtimäki, head of information security at Ficora, says the change, “would hardly be noticed by the public,” according to the story, which also has him saying it’sunlikely anyone in Finland, “was seriously endorsing eavesdropping powers similar to Sweden’s”.

Monitoring internet chatrooms was, “probably not a terribly effective a way to catch terrorists,” he stated.

“The volume of data is so enormous that it is rather like looking for a needle in a haystack. If somebody is plotting terrorist acts, it is likely they are able to hamper intelligence operations or even make them impossible with a range of encryption methods.”

In Denmark, the surveillance law, “has put the state on a collision course with innovative new businesses,” argues Roger Grönberg, CEO of Momail, says The Local.

“An email exchange between two Danes for instance is first sent to Momail’s operations centre, where it is optimized and tailored to meet the customer’s specific needs,” says the story.

This means company email will, “cross Sweden’s borders” and will be scanned by Sweden’s National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA), it has Grönberg saying, going on:

“It will not be easy to explain this to our private Danish customers or to the Danish mobile operators who are our clients.”

. .Stumble It!

carte blanche to spy - Sweden’s new Big Brother spy law, June 20, 2008
NewsRoom Finland - Finland closely affected by Swedish spy law, July 1, 2008
The Local - Swedish firm: ‘New law will drive businesses out of the country’, June 30, 2008

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!

Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile - http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 9:29 am and is filed under Politics, Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 2694 times