tolgfors

And take Ã…kesson with you please!

Sten Tolgfors (Minister of Defense) and Ingvar Ã…kesson (Director of the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA)) has together almost completely discredited the sitting Government (which I liked until the started pushing laws that impede human rights and our constitution).

Now Tolgfors declares in a swedish debate article that no single person is being monitored, and by doing that he unintentionally implies that they are really doing surveillance of all citizens. He also repeats the same things that has been said before and alread broken down by other debaters and bloggers. One of these things are that traffic that does not match (the secret) algorithms used by FRA will be thrown away, and once again misses the point that once their supercomputers look at the traffic the breach of privacy is complete.

At the (almost) same time Ingvar Ã…kesson set out to hunt down one of the bloggers that are putting up the biggest fight, Henrik Alexandersson (HAX), and reports him to the Justice chancellor for publishing secret documents. These documents shows that The Radio Defense Agency has been monitoring swedish citizens since 1996 (!!!). One of them details 103 persons (including religious and financial leaders) that was being monitored and the other one is a breif of surveillance carried out on people that had business and educational contacts within Russia.

Of course, this was not a very good move. The response from bloggers and the Swedish Pirate party was to re-publish these documents and link to them on hundreds of blogs.

This was also enough to wake another “blog-quake” here in Sweden and put even harder press on the Government.

I personally can not believe that these people are still at their current positions. In other countries revelations and lies like those that are now being revealed would force the involved to resign immediately. If not voluntarily, then by force by the Prime Minister. And about the PM, where the hell is he in this debate? Total silence.

Sweden is going from a democratic state to something like DDR in 500mph.. I wonder where (or if) this is going end.

A small sidenote to this debate is that some political parties are going to suggest (one suggested, another one being readied for submission) the following laws:

* Police DNA registration of all citizens born after 1975 (3 million people, no joke, swedish link)
* A snitch law that would make it illegal not to report seeing a crime (swedish link again), this would bring the Soviet era back but this time here.

[irony] Niceness! [/irony].

What are the Swedish politicians thinking? I haven’t got a clue. I hope they have one… or maybe not, that might make this more frightening.