Liberal Road Blog Individual Freedom and Equality

The Swedish government is going on with plans of a new law allowing the wiretapping and monitoring of all phone and data traffic in Sweden (Source:Svenska Dagbladet, in Swedish. See also my old post about this proposition). The law proposition will be voted in the parliament later.

It is a pity the government isn’t listening enough to critics. Although the proposition has slightly been changed, the spying for the need of the government will not require any approval by a controlling authority.

Allowing the listening of phone calls and the monitoring of all data traffic is a violation of the privacy. I understand that to solve crimes phone listening is sometimes necessary, but in that case there should be some evidence that the persons in question may have committed a serious crime. Secondly the listening should be submitted to a court.

But in this law proposition the listening would be more based on keywords. For example if a phone call contains some keywords it would be listened to. This means non suspects would be listened to.

This law proposition shows that the government clearly doesn’t care about the rights to privacy of people and this is a dangerous step toward a Big Brother state.

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