Sweden’s “Big Brother” law, allowing the government to snoop on all outgoing cross-border emails, could be blocked tomorrow by a handful of rebel parliamentarians ready to defy their party whips.
If the dissenters derail the law - dubbed Lex Orwell by the Swedes - it will be a major blow to the centre-right government, which claims that it needs the restrictions, the tightest in Europe, to guard itself against terrorist plotting. But critics say it makes a nonsense of Sweden’s long modern tradition of respecting privacy and citizens rights and is part of a more disturbing trend across Europe to scratch away at civil liberties.
The latest example, which stirred concern in Sweden, was British efforts to extend the period of detention for terror suspects: the rebels are consciously drawing on the example of David Davis, the Conservative who resigned to fight more independently against the state encroaching on individual rights.
Karl Sigfrid, a member of the ruling Moderate party, said today that he was determined to vote against the law.
“Preventing the cable-based surveillance system is more important than my political future,” he said.
“Mass surveillance of Swedish citizens is a measure that is not proportionate to the problems Swedish authorities are expected to solve.”
The centre-right coalition of prime minister Frederik Reinfeldt has only a four seat majority. Yet so far at least four deputies from the coalition ranks, including Mr Sigfrid, have indicated that they will defy the whips. The parties met until the early hours of this morning to see what could be done to persuade the mavericks - Annie Johansson of the Centre Party, Cecilia Wikstroem and Birgitta Ohlsson of the Liberals were all deeply sceptical about the law - to toe the line. The talks resumed a few hours later before the beginning of the debate in parliament. Yet it is still unclear whether the government would scrape the vote.
Although the established printed press opposes the law, the liberal Dagens Nyheter said the government was about to take on Stasi-like powers, the driving force of the protest has been the blogging community.
A Facebook protest group has over five thousand members and they in turn have been influencing the youth wings of the government parties, sewing the seeds of a parliamentary rebellion. They are up in arms about the restrictions which seem to change fundamentally the terms by which Scandinavians use the internet. The new bill gives extended interception powers to the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) which, despite its title is a civilian agency. Operators will have to help the authorities by channelling information about their users to the FRA through so-called collection nodes. The FRA argues that it is not focussed on individual email traffic and phone conversations; the agency would pick up on key word searches and would use pattern analysis.
But as a former head of the Swedish security service, Anders Eriksson complains the government will be given a free hand to fish for information. He says too much reliance is being put on the good will of the state authorities.
“Instead of having a single representative of a government authority make that decision we should, as in other countries, subject this activity to democratic and parliamentary monitoring,” said Mr Eriksson.
The bill was also too vague in authorising intercepts in case of “external threat”, said the former security head.
The implications for internet service providers are huge. Those in neighbouring countries will have to route around Sweden because if they expose their customers to surveillance, they could open themselves up to legal action. Finnish providers are already taking steps. Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, has also made it plain that it will not place Google servers in Sweden if the bill is passed.
“Apart from the stringent surveillance measures,” says Mr Fleicscher, “the Minister of Justice also want to introduce a monitoring duty for internet access providers.” This, he said, (see peterfleischer.blogspot.com), would fly in the face of European eCommerce legislation.
Other countries are extending their powers: in Britain, Home office officials have been discussing a giant database holding details of every phone call and e-mail for at least 12 months. In Germany, the nation most sensitive to data privacy abuse, the main telecommunications group has had to admit that it actively trawled through confidential phone records to track down a mole in the Deutsche Telekom boardroom.
But Sweden is proud of its tradition of guarding the rights of the individual. It was the first society to introduce the principle of the government ombudsman. And by law, journalists are not allowed to reveal their sources unless the sources give them explicit permission. Now reporters fear that this unusual professional protection will also disappear.
“The declared intention of this law is to protect Sweden from outside threats,” said the Sydsvenskan newspaper,” but it risks being transformed into a domestic threat.”
