A law is being drafted in Sweden, according to which the country's security service will have the access to the information going out of the country through Russian channels. The intelligence services will be gathering information transmitted through mobile and landline telephones as well as via email. 80 percent of Russian telecom traffic goes through Sweden.
Russian operators view this initiative as an attempt of industrial espionage on state level and express their willingness to have the traffic bypass Sweden if necessary, as Svenska Dagbladet writes.
"Our geographic location is such that 80% of Russian contacts with most of the world is running via cables through Sweden," a source in close contact with Swedish security services said. "The main reason for the new law is that the government and other authorities need intelligence reports about Russia."
The thing is that for quite some time Russian espionage has been much of a headache for the West, including Sweden.
According to the newspaper, the law will oblige the operators to record the information coming from Russia on the servers. After that Swedish intelligence agency - Defense Radio Establishment (FRA) - will thoroughly study the data.
Most of the Russian telecom traffic goes abroad through Finland and Sweden, mainly through TeliaSonera infrastructure, as a source in one of the Russian operators has confirmed.
The law on eavesdropping was forwarded to the Swedish parliament back in 2007. Yet its main objective -- gaining the access to the information coming from Russia - has been kept secret. It was because FRA wanted to keep its intentions secret as long as possible so that Russian telecommunication companies could not set up any additional channels running abroad.
In response, Russian authorities claim that the Swedes are unlikely to decipher the encrypted information.
"Sweden is setting up nothing but the system of commercial espionage. All of the information linked to the state secrets is transmitted through other channels - via diplomatic mail, satellites and high-quality communication channels," as one of the Russian experts claims.
In this connection Russian press reminds that Swedish Ministry of Defense has already tried to set up a total surveillance of the country's population a year and a half ago. Back then Director of Swedish Security Police (SEPO) Klas Bergstrand stopped it at the cost of his own life.
December 22, 2006 Sweden's Defense Ministry sent a document to all interested authorities, which offered to set up a nationwide tapping of the entire computer communications with the outside world. There was a reason why they picked the last working day before the Christmas holidays: according to the law, the government authorities had to express their opinion within a two-week period, and only after that the government could make a decision. Klas Bergstrand saw there was no time to avert the de facto anti-constitutional coup in any other way, so he put a statement of protest on SEPO's website on behalf of State Security Police, which he was in charge of.
After the outburst of scandal the project of the military was taken off the agenda and Mr. Bergstrand all of a sudden died of a heart attack on January 22, 2007. He was only 61 years of age. Everybody knew him to be a good sportsman who never complained about any health problems. The newspaper stresses that today's command of SEPO does not voice any protests.
"If this draft passes, Sweden will become a horrible example for the world in the neglect of human rights and elimination of legal norms," said former head of SEPO, Anders Ericksson, who is now in charge of the State Registration Committee, the authority handling all of the proposals on gathering data about the country's population.
Department of Monitoring,
Kavkaz Center
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