I would be very interested to know what a swede has to say about this. My general impression of Sweden (at least sitting here in Germany), is that it is a liberal minded country by european standards - that is that in general the scandanavian countries are on the forefront as leading examples of how modern societies should behave.
This article seems to imply the opposite, why would Sweden veto this unless they have some serious spionage going on themselves? For me, it also makes the assange affair seem more dubious than before as if Sweden were basically following US mandate.
Conveniently, this doesn't separate between citizens and non-citizens, just traffic that crosses the border, and since most of us use services globally, most of our traffic crosses the border, and is therefore intercepted legally.
Sweden has an interesting relationship with NATO, in as such that the majority of the population would never want to join, but at the same time there has always been an expectation since the end of WW2 that it would be in the strategic interest of NATO to protect Sweden from Soviet/Russia. Sweden pays for this protection secretly by being a lapdog and the latest payment was of course an increase in the amount of intelligence data given to the US, and the FRA law provided the legal framework for increasing collection of such data.
During the public debate around the FRA law, opponents speculated that the law intention was never to catch terrorist. Rather, the law was to fill a gap in "goods" to use for trade with the international spying community, which previous was provided by radio surveillance directed at Russia.
If that theory was true, then the current actions of Sweden makes perfectly sense.
People here don't care. The general opinion about the right to privacy is that it's A Good Thing, but why would you care about your data if you have nothing to hide? The debate focusing on questions regarding privacy and integrity before the FRA law was a media charade and in the end people didn't care enough to oppose the FRA law. Most of the opponents were pirates and the debate often times came down to a discussion of intellectual property instead. Respectable members of society didn't want to associate with pirates, I guess.
What's happening now is just an extension of that. People know that the gouvernment collects the data. It's a bit weird that "we" veto something like this, but other than that there's nothing new.
There was this intelligence affair in the seventies called the IB affair where there was profiling (among other things) directed against left wing groups. It caused a big stir when it was revealed to the public. What's happening now is IMO more extensive, but what's known about the activities related to the FRA law is supported by law.
Political profiling is still criminal. We don't know of any political profiling taking place at the moment, but the FRA law certainly makes it easier.
The Swedish military is allowed to listen to all communications crossing the nations borders. All ISPs are also required to route all their traffic through the militarys network.
> as if Sweden were basically following US mandate
I have little doubt that it was. Sweden may be decades ahead in social liberties, but when it comes to the US, very few countries can say no to it. Europe has traditionally been under the US influence and, as the NSA scandal shows, it will continue to stay loyal and compliant.
For example, during the H1N1 vaccinations, a Finland woman that had some good credibility, pointed that the Sweden vaccines were dangerous, she claimed that Sweden had some sort of conspiracy with the US to get rid of young people.
Lots of people believed it was balooney at the time, but now we have Swedish young people with narcolepsy because of the vaccine (it only affected those below 20).
Now the balooney claim, look a lot less balooney... But I still wonder what the hell is going on sometimes... All of my ideas fail both henlan and occam razors, but maybe there IS some conspiracy really going on...
Please cite facts, not unsubstantiated tinfoil hat material devoid of citations.
I has been shown [1] that the risk of being affected by narcolepsy among children vaccinated with Pandremix is 4.19 times higher than the risk among children that were not vaccinated with that particular vaccine. This in Sweden, related to the H1N1 mass vaccinations.
69 verified diagnoses of narcolepsy were found among vaccinated children. It has not been proven that all cases of narcolepsy were directly caused by the vaccine.
Your claim that this Finnish woman's assertion that the Swedish gov't in cahoots with the US gov't wanted to "get rid of young people" is somehow not "balooney" is patently ridiculous based on the simple facts.
Did anyone in Sweden claim that the vaccines weren't dangerous? The point of vaccines is that they're less risky than the disease they're preventing, even considering the low likelihood of contracting a disease.
Since the 70s seemly all mass vacinations related to H1N1 caused more damage than the disease itself.
H1N1 spreads fast, but is not much deadly anymore.
Here in Brazil for example, H1N1 infected a good part of the population, but only about 100 people died, while common flu killed 100 people each day.
And the H1N1 vaccine also caused some mayhem.
I am not dismissing vaccines in general, or saying that even a dangerous vaccine is not worth it (the original vaccine, was very dangerous, yet made a disease get erased from Earth), but there was people saying specifically that the H1N1 vaccine that only Sweden used, was clearly dangerous for young people, too bad those people had no proof... But now that the vaccine DID caused more damage than the disease.
> Since the 70s seemly all mass vacinations related to H1N1 caused more damage than the disease itself.
Do you really think anyone will believe that if you don't give us a source?
The 2009 H1N1 pandemic alone killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people[1]. CDC estimates that in USA alone, 11,690 died and 257,000 ended up in hospitals[2]. I can't find any source that brings vaccine deaths to anywhere close to that.
In /r/sweden they basically say "This is a national security issue, EU isn't a nation, we want to deal with this ourselves". And then they rant a little on how the Guardian is way2leftist.
And it is. I don't know what the EU is trying to do, other than having Europe speak with one voice to make it more powerful. But truth be told, as the article points out, it is mostly to save face, I doubt European leaders are really that worried (or surprised).
Europe isn't that much better than the US, just more timid.
Yeah, I agree with their move here. If the EU really wants to start getting into issues that deal with fundamental sovereignty as opposed to the environment or labor and capital flows, I can think of a number of countries that would be out before the gavel even hit the block.
I live in Sweden. I share your general impression about the Scandinavian countries.
Our ethical and ideological standards seem to have been somewhat tarnished over the last decades, but I think the overall idea still seems to hold.
With regard to electronic surveillance Sweden does indeed have 'some serious espionage' going on. The expanded mandate for the FRA (one branch of Swedish intelligence service) has been mentioned several times in this thread. ISP:s and other providers of cable bound communications are obligated by law to send a copy of all communications to FRA. FRA has a mandate to monitor communications crossing the national borders. As HN readers will probably agree, it's not really feasible to make the distinction about borders at, so I surmise the arrangement must be one of collecting everything and filtering out the disallowed communications.
Sweden was early to build an extensive optic fiber infrastructure and as a result is a key area for European communications. Much of the information traffic of Northern Europe has a high chance of passing Swedish borders.
The current surveillance arrangement was legalized in 2008, under in my opinion scandalous conditions. Popular opinion, to the extent that people understood the issue, was strongly opposed to instating mass surveillance. Mass surveillance is arguably in violation of the Swedish constitution. Most referral organizations for the preparation of the law advised against it in no uncertain terms. The right wing coalition had plenty of internal opposition against the law (it comprises liberal parties, which are in many respects natural enemies of the surveillance state).
In spite of all this, the law was passed. The path there involved a lot of unpalatable things: The rhetoric was one usually reserved for wartimes, with a lot of scare about nebulous "external threats". Members of parliament for the dominant conservative party were told that voting against would be to "shoot at a conservative prime minister". Young and particularly liberal-minded members of the government parties (these were often people who had run for election on championing privacy and rights of the individual) had it made clear that their political careers would be very difficult from now on, should they choose to vote against the party line. One single such opponent voted against the law in spite of this, and another previously vocal opponent abstained from voting. The remaining ones turned to vote in favour of the bill, making it pass. The vote was placed as the last thing for the parliament to do just ahead of a major national holiday. There was a lot of unexplained urgency about passing the law /now/, to the point of 'let's pass it /now/ and we'll come back in the autumn season and amend the privacy protection'. There was numerous misrepresentations about how the system would work, what information would be gathered and the significance of the information, much like what we have been seeing from the NSA recently. (e.g outright ignoring legitimate concerns about privacy and trying to frame such concerns as quaint and uneducated. 'Nobody is going to read your email', and so on. (This one is /technically/ true in most cases -- if you are going to sift through the totality of a technologically advanced nation's data streams you don't do it by having people /read/ the contents. You push it through a supercomputer for analysis -- and yet it is effectively a lie to the uninitiated about what the issue is about))
I could go on about this for quite some time, but I think I have dwelt on this point enough for this format. For those who speak and read Swedish it may be interesting to review the news from around this time and in particular the parliament's session on the 17th. http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/Debatter--beslut/Debatter-och-bes...
To me, 18 June 2008 was the day Swedish democracy was ultimately subverted and my country was coerced to abandon the liberal and democratic ideals for which it has long been a bright example.
The current government of Sweden is in terms of political parties the same as it was in 2008. They rose to power arguably in no small part due to skilful spin doctoring and restyling of the conservative party as a party for the regular citizen rather than the elites. In practice the differences between these 'new' conservatives and the old ones has been small.
There are parallels in style to the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush, and these parallels are probably not coincidental. I have seen it claimed that Karl Rove was the one who advised the campaign that established this current Swedish right wing government. Prime minister Fredrik Reinfeld liked to stress during the Bush era his good relation with Dubya and has described him in admiring words.
I seems to recall that parts of the diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks contains text to the effect that this Swedish government was considered 'cooperative' but had 'some difficulties with public opinion'. Perhaps someone more familiar with the diplomatic cables can clarify or elaborate.
My opinion is that the current Swedish government probably still has deep ties to the US government and is very anxious to be considered a valuable partner. The FRA mass surveillance infrastructure in Sweden would certainly make a valuable source of "signal intelligence" for the US and I would not be that surprised to see Sweden as deeply involved as Great Britain.
The Swedish people do not in general sympathize with the surveillance state, but many people seem to have a rather limited understanding of what has been done and the extent of how it could be used.
This article seems to imply the opposite, why would Sweden veto this unless they have some serious spionage going on themselves? For me, it also makes the assange affair seem more dubious than before as if Sweden were basically following US mandate.