Swedish Authorities Take Action Against Blogger For Revealing Surveillance Documents

Legal Issues

from the free-speech-violation? dept

Wille Faler writes “Swedish blogger and civil rights activist Henrik Alexandersson has been reported for “freedom of speech” violations by the head of FRA (Swedish National Defense Radio Establishment), the government agency that is responsible for surveilling the contents, origins and destinations of all phone calls, internet traffic and text messages passing through swedish networks, regardless of suspicion or not. Alexandersson published a classified document on his blog some time ago that had been leaked to him, that proved how FRA had been conducting illegal surveillance against innocent Swedes for more than ten years. It is this offense that has landed him in trouble and deemed him a “threat to national security.” In other word, the messenger gets shot for whistleblowing about the illegal conduct of government agencies.”

It’s interesting that this comes so soon after Sweden passed a new law that lets the gov’t tap all forms of communication. While you can understand the government’s position, this definitely does appear to be punishing the whistleblower, which is all too common these days. Plus, of course, in attacking the guy who brought this info public, the Swedish government is all but guaranteeing that it gets that much more attention.

Filed Under: blogger, surveillance, sweden, whistle blowing