THE BLANKET WIRETAPPING BILL IS ALMOST THERE

This morning Sweden's parliament, the Riksdag, sent blanket wiretapping bill, the FRA Act, back to the Defense Committee. There it was approved after its sponsors had added some new lipstick and padded up the bra. It is now back on the Riksdag's floor and approval is expected.

This law, again, gives Sweden's military intelligence service, the FRA, the right to wiretap without search warrant every e-mail account, every phone (landline as well as cellular), every fax and every internet server in the country. They are formally supposed to monitor communication across the nation's borders, but since it is practically impossible to put a wiretap at the physical border the FRA "has to" monitor all communication and then - at least according to the sponsors and supporters of this bill - concentrate on whatever is crossing the borders.

Because of how the FRA Act is designed, and because of the technical aspects of this kind of wiretapping, the effective consequence of the law is that the military intelligence service will be wiretapping all electronic communications of every private citizen in Sweden. Then they will search that communication for whatever search terms they want to apply to it. In order to do this they obviously have to tape it all and store it for the search process.

More importantly: the incumbent administration - the prime minister and his cabinet - will have the right to access the database that contains all the recorded communication. That gives them unprecedented opportunities to spy on political adversaries or individuals they simply do no like.

As the icing on the totalitarian cake, let us not forget who the private citizen is:

-The average family who calls or writes e-mails to friends, in Sweden or abroad;
-The student doing research for a senior thesis whose internet searches are being recorded by the FRA and then examined in detail;
-The newspaper, which relies on anonymous tips or confidential sources to uncover wrongdoings by the government, will no longer be able to grant anonymity to its sources;
-The private business that is considering making investments abroad that would lower taxes and expand business.

There are many scandals in Sweden's tarnished modern political history that would never have been uncovered if the government had been able to do this type of surveillance at that time. They would have found out about the informants and either shredded all evidence or simply bullied the source into silence.

The FRA Act will pass, but the opposition parties - the big socialists, the little socialists and the green socialists - will vote against it. Nobody should assume, though, that this means the law will be repealed if they win the 2010 election. The law was conceived by the former socialist prime minister, Goran Persson, who once said that he would "personally brand and stigmatize anyone who criticized Sweden abroad". His minister of justice, Thomas Bodstrom, wrote the bulk of the current law in 2004 with another former socialist cabinet member, Par Nuder. Only cosmetic differences exist between their version of this bill and the one that is now on its way to become law. Their opposition to this law is therefore only an expression of political tactics: they know this law is unpopular and they think they can ride on that sentiment in to a victory in the next election. Then, after they have been in office for four years, nobody will ever remember that the FRA Act even exists and they can use it to monitor their opposition.

Essentially, the center-right coalition is carrying the water for the socialists and will feel the pain as they are returned to their regular status as an opposition group in the parliament in 2010.