Sweden 'a close partner' in NSA surveillance

http://www.thelocal.se/50096/20130906/

by yesbabyyes • 13 years ago

206 51 13 years ago

Sharlin2• 13 years ago

It was not that hard to guess that the main impetus behind the FRA law and the capability to spy on the Russians' Internet traffic was the prospect of trading any valuable pieces of intel with friendly major powers, apparently specifically the US. In retrospect it occurs to me that the Americans might actually have been actively lobbying for the law in the first place.

mongol• 13 years ago

Yes I agree this is very likely. FRA has certainly provided much valuable intel in the past from radio analysis and for the cooperation to continue it felt the need to listen into cabled communication as well.

geon2• 13 years ago

the Americans might actually have been actively lobbying for the law in the first place.

Very likely. That's how the pirate bay got raided. Sadly, the swedish government has been very opaque in their dealings with the us.

antocv2• 13 years ago

Of course it is, and it was before the internet as Sweden has cables to/from Russia over which most of Russias traffic passes.

Ive heard from former employees at the then government owned Tele company that they had secretly installed black boxes in specific locations.

The FRA-law if you remember, which was passed after FRA illegally surveilled all communications they could get to make it legal, collects huge amounts of data, just like NSA, and then they trade with their NSA/GHCQ counter-parts. One argument for the surveillence was from some right-wing military person "Sweden needs a bargaining chip in the international scene".

Udo• 13 years ago

"Sweden needs a bargaining chip in the international scene"

Only it's not a bargaining chip, it's an ongoing commitment, a liability they can never get back out of. Once in place, pressure of all kinds is being exerted to make sure it stays that way.

antocv2• 13 years ago

Indeed.

I almost vomited when I read the ministers defence of this law and this relevation "we do this for freedom and democracy and to safeguard Swedish soldiers in foreign countries" then another one "we have regulations, courts and other laws in place to make sure everything is done by the rulebook".

bsullivan01• 13 years ago

One argument for the surveillence was from some right-wing military person "Sweden needs a bargaining chip in the international scene".

Ok then, he needs to look at the map http://www.sitesatlas.com/Maps/Maps/502.gif and then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finlandization

Russsia isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

juhanima• 13 years ago

Actually, fear of Russia is the most powerful argument of the right-wing types. That is the very reason why Sweden has been eager to co-operate and assimilate with the west.

Luckily for them, Finland has always been there to buffer and protect them from the easter invasion.

EDIT: Having made such bold statements, thought it would be decent to provide some links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-Novgorodian_Wars

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish_War_(1554%E2%80%9...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish_War_(1590%E2%80%9...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Nordic_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish_War_(1741%E2%80%9...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish_War_(1788%E2%80%9...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Swedish_War_(1808%E2%80%9...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War

'Always' was obviously an exaggaration. Eight hundred years would be more accurate, which is pretty much as far as written history goes at these parts.

brown9-2• 13 years ago

I think it's pretty safe to say that the intelligence agencies of almost all Cold War era allies are still close partners. Governments on either side still generally regard the other side as potential adversaries.

Sharlin2• 13 years ago

Of course, the Swedes still officially claim to be neutral, like they were during the Cold War (and in WW2 and WW1). In practice, it's of course obvious which side they liked best.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

The socialists. Obviously.

gaius• 13 years ago

I don't think it's nearly as clear cut as that. Neutrality means you're willing to work with whoever wins. It requires a high level of moral ambivalence.

jdp23• 13 years ago

The information was presented to the EU parliament by Duncan Campbell -- who broke the ECHELON story 25 years ago. [1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Campbell_%28journalist%2...

speeder• 13 years ago

I think.now people.can stop.dismissing those that claim Sweden dislike wikileaks as "tin foil.hatters"

philwelch2• 13 years ago

Clearly, since delimiting words with periods rather than spaces is the new tinfoil hat.

nitrogen2• 13 years ago

It's a common side effect of typing on a mobile phone keyboard that places the period next to the space bar.

mpyne3• 13 years ago

I think the claims have always been more along the lines that why go out of the way to have Sweden extradite Assange for charges that haven't popped up when he was right there in the U.K.?

Prime Minister Cameron reinforced the other day that the 'special relationship' still exists, so why should Assange have more to fear from Sweden than the U.K.?

trevelyan4• 13 years ago

Because Assange is not charged with anything they can nail him for in the UK. The fact the UK government is nonetheless spending 8 million annually just policing the embassy suggests they hold a rational belief they can get their way with him in Sweden, possibly before he is even charged with anything.

Seriously... has the government ever spent even 1/2 that amount in a situation where someone is wanted for extradition but has yet to be charged for a non-crime? How about 1/10th or 1/100th of that amount? If Assange really had nothing to fear in Sweden the rational act for the UK government would be giving him passage to Ecuador, saving millions in useless spending, and cashing in the whole thing a favor to the OAS.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

Sweden's official foreign policy has been armed neutrality for a very long time, almost as long as for Switzerland. Sweden has not been a combatant power in any war in living memory.

But geographic reality compels Sweden to be aware of who its friends might be in moments of trouble. Some nearby countries that were not combatant powers (at first) were overrun during World War II. So Sweden arms, yes, to be able to maintain neutrality as best it can, and it also pursues an active foreign policy of making friends without making alliances with the countries that best support Sweden's cultural heritage and aspirations for freedom and prosperity.

Here in the land of the Swedish diaspora, where almost everyone knows somebody with Swedish ancestry, the local public university's law school has an exchange program with the law program at a Swedish university. I remember hearing a talk on Sweden's defense strategy given at the law school here in 1989 by a visiting Swedish professor. He, and almost everyone else in Sweden at the time, was quite concerned by repeated incursions into Swedish territorial waters by Soviet submarines on training missions. The Soviet Union and its successor state Russia have an obvious strategic interest in controlling access to harbors in Sweden, so Sweden has an obvious strategic interest in knowing whether or not Russia is planning any hostile moves. Sweden needs to be informed about the outside world to maintain its policy of armed neutrality. The cooperation described in this article is not surprising in that historical and current events context.

AFTER EDIT: I would be delighted to hear from anyone who can let me know what facts they think I have got wrong here, as the pattern of upvotes and downvotes so far suggests that someone disagrees with me, but I'm not completely sure why.

davorb• 13 years ago

I think people are voting you down because what you are saying is based on Sweden's "official" line during the Cold War. A lot of new information has been revealed post-1994, that pretty much shows that Sweden was anything but neutral during that period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_neutrality#The_Cold_Wa...

http://www.thelocal.se/18262/20090317/

rickjames282• 13 years ago

Why would Sweden be neutral during the cold war - putting aside nuance, you're either pro-eastern bloc or not?

reinhardt• 13 years ago

Does this mean that the "truly anonymous" VPN providers that have sprung up like mushrooms in Sweden thanks to a supposedly privacy-friendly law are dead in the water?

toyg• 13 years ago

yeah, I never got the appeal of those services. After all, it's the country that all but threw out the rulebook to nail the PirateBay people and then Assange. Not the friendliest haven for digital rights, imho.

tjoff• 13 years ago

I don't know what privacy-friendly law you are talking about.

VPNs in Sweden have always been a bad choice, you have less protection than a regular swedish ISP would give you from a legal perspective.

The reason VPNs became popular in Sweden is because of the FRA and the IPRED law (giving content producers the right to ask an ISP (via a court) for information about who is behind an IP address so that they can build a case and sue).

goombastic• 13 years ago

Given that government has access to this much information and is not using it to hunt down tax dodgers etc, does it mean they are actively protecting the rich?

_delirium• 13 years ago

It's fairly common to silo national-security-sensitive information, to avoid revealing sources or methods for things deemed not important enough to be worth it. The NSA doesn't share its data with the IRS or even regular police departments, either.

CurtMonash2• 13 years ago

This puts Julian Assange's problems with Sweden -- and the UK/Sweden cooperation in same -- into a whole different context.

geon2• 13 years ago

Please elaborate.

CurtMonash2• 13 years ago

Sweden is an important intelligence partner of the US. Assange is an enemy of US intelligence (even if he isn't focused directly on US espionage the way Snowden is).

Ras_• 13 years ago

FRA is one of the reasons why Finland is very close to building another cable to Germany via the Baltic Sea, bypassing Sweden. It's politically very high on the to-do list.

Follow-on project would be to connect it to Asia via the Northwest passage. Russian company is already laying some cable there, but connecting these two is wishful thinking at the moment. On land the cables are already there, reaching from Helsinki to near Russian Murmansk.

Pictures here: http://yle.fi/uutiset/suomi_haluaa_oman_tietoliikennereitin_...

Sweden 'a close partner' in NSA surveillance

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