THE REINFELDT ADMINISTRATION TRIES NEW PROPAGANDA TRICK

In order to sell the FRA Act ex post facto and silence the critics, Prime Minister Reinfeldt has asked Anders Wik, the head of FRA, to write an op-ed in Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden's largest newspapers. This is an unprecedented presence in media and a clear sign that Reinfeldt has realized that he is very nervous that this thing is going to come back and haunt him in the 2010 election.

The Swedish people is not shielded from eavesdropping just because we are not wiretappin in Sweden. That the FRA Act would create Stasi-style surveillance, unique to the Western World, is simply not true.

From a technical standpoint he is correct, of course. But this is not a matter of wiretapping technology, nor about what others are doing. American, British and German intelligence services operate under a different legal and political framework than FRA. U.S. intelligence services are tightly controlled by Congress, and eavesdropping programs such as Echelon and Protect America do not give eternal, unlimited wiretapping rights to the agencies in charge. Protect America was, e.g., time limited and expired when Congress refused to renew it. The FRA Act is unlimited in time as well as the scope of the wiretapping. The only limit on it is supposedly the search parameters once everyone's e-mails and phone calls have been recorded.

Foreign intelligence services are already eavesdropping on a broad scale. If FRA stopped listening to international communications to and from Sweden we would only become more dependent on what foreign intelligence services intercept.

If the FRA could present a single case where they have gotten information from abroad that their new program - and only their new program - would have intercepted, then the case for the FRA program would perhaps be a bit more credible. But Anders Wik does not do that. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that this program comes nowhere near the necessity that would merit its vast infringements on privacy.

Then Wik goes on to try to make the case that the FRA program is not suitable for "spying" on people:

You can test an FRA'er by talking about the spying that the FRA does. The reaction will immediately be that "no, no, FRA is doing legal intelligence, spying is illegal intelligence. The FRA does not break the law". I learned this when I started at the FRA and it is as true today [as it was then]. The FRA must not break the law, nor does the FRA do that. To call electronic surveillance spying and the FRA employees "agents" and "spies" is journalistically colorful, but also a way to portray our operations as shady and illegal.

First of all, intelligence services almost by definition do their job in the shades. If they did it out in the open they would not be effective. Secondly, what Wik is actually saying is that whatever a spy did before the FRA Act was passed, the FRA can now do legally. That defeats the entire purpose with his article - he inadvertently admits that the Riksdag now has legalized spying.

FRA has been scanning international communications for many years. If you write "bomb, terror, attack, Usama" in an e-mail you actually do not get caught in our system, even if it is in a foreign language and sent to the Middle East.

Up until now, when every e-mail, phone call, fax and internet activity will be blanket recorded and kept on file.

The FRA is doing international surveillance, the police does the national [surveillance]

What Anders Wik does not mention is that it is technically impossible to separate international electronic communications from national comunications. You cannot put a wiretap at the geographic border and then only sort out Sweden-to-World or World-to-Sweden communications. To achieve its goals the FRA has to wiretap at the communication platform - the internet server, the cell phone tower, the telephone and fax landline switchboard.

Then he goes over to try to reassure the Swedish people that the FRA are good guys who would not want to spy - er... eavesdrop - on domestic communications.

The client [odd term/ExpSw] who demanded domestic survaillance would not be met sympathetically but would face counter-arguments.

Swedish politicians and government bureaucracies have a long, tainted history of abusing the "trust us" phrase. The Swedish public sector is one of the most corrupt in the EU. But more importantly, even if Anders Wik was correct in that the FRA staff would defy their own government and employer, and say that they wanted no part in a domestic surveillance program, their employer would simply fire them and replace them with more compliant staff. Given the Swedish culture of unabridged compliance and the relatively shaky job market, it is unlikely that anyone at FRA would risk their jobs over this issue.

The biggest problem with the FRA Act is that the government will now blanket wiretap and record electronic communications - and then, after the fact, have the opportunity to search the recorded material for whatever information they want to. In fact, the FRA Act does give the prime minister and his/her cabinet the right to select search parameters for scanning the recorded communications. That opens for direct political abuse of the FRA surveillance system, which is exactly what the Act's critics fear will happen. Nothing that Anders Wik says helps reduce those concerns.

If anything, the very fact that he is writing this article shows that Prime Minister Reinfeldt is more concerned about the political fallout from the FRA Act - and the consequences of the law - than he has admitted.