BIG BROTHER IS HAVING A BALL

On Wednesday June 18 Sweden's parliament, the Riksdag, was supposed to pass a law that will give the government absolutely uninhibited rights to wiretap every resident of the country. It was planned that the law, which gives the government a blanket right to wiretap anyone's e-mail, fax, cell phone or landline, would sail through the parliamentary process without any real problem. Instead, it will now be sent back to a parliamentary subcommittee for some semantic redrafting.

Then the members of the Riksdag will pass the bill smoothly and quietly. And once it has become the law of the land, Sweden's military intelligence service FRA will have a legal right to record and analyze all electronic communication between private citizens in Sweden - family or business makes no difference.

This bill, commonly referred to in Sweden as the FRA Act, is technically defined to allow the FRA to wiretap electronic correspondence that crosses the country's borders. But since it is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to wiretap internet-carried communication at the geographic border of a country, the wiretapping will take place within the country, at internet servers, fax machines, telephones etc. Only after this blanket wiretapping has taken place will the FRA, according to the statutes in this proposed law, single out international communication and analyze that. Obviously, that is not going to happen. The FRA will keep all its wiretap material and conduct whatever surveillance it wishes of the public.

Sweden's government will also have access to the material, with opportunities to do keyword searches for certain types of information.

The FRA Act is, of course, the most far reaching surveillance law in the free world. In fact, with this law Sweden takes the leap over the edge of the cliff and down into the abyss of totalitarianism. The purpose behind the law is, of course, not what the government has alleged, namely to catch terrorists in the tact. Sweden has never stood up against terrorists; the country's minuscule contributions to the military operations in Afghanistan have been kept to an absolute minimum and the Swedish armed forces are so pathetically ill equipped that they are having trouble even participating in joint EU operations. Sweden's socialist governments have sponsored terror groups like ANC, Hamas and PLO more generously than almost any other government. Then incumbent prime minister Goran Persson vehementely criticized the American-led liberation of Iraq.

After their victory in the 2006 election the center-right coalition has not changed any policies in this respect. So the claim that this law is needed to protect Sweden from imminent or even conceivable terror threats is ridiculous.

This true purpose behind the FRA Act becomes all the more obvious when we take into account that the bill was originally written by the socialist government back in 2004. The incumbent center-right government is barely any different in its policies from their socialist predecessors; in fact, they behave as though they are a bunch of substitutes while the socialists take a break and let a new generation rise to power. Therefore, they continue the socialist politics of the past with no real change in mind, let alone on the horizon. They are trying to copy the socialists in every relevant aspect. This law just happens to be part of the package.

Sweden is on a fast track to totalitarianism. Next on the agenda for Sweden's power elite is a re-writing of the constitution. The current one is 34 years old. Imagining what will come out of that re-writing is nightmare-inducing.