This article was first published in Stockholm News 2008-09-15:
Two documentaries about the controversial FRA-legislation was broadcast on Swedish TV Sunday night.
One of them suggested that the government had another reason than what they officially said for pressing the law through in parliament despite the massive opposition. The other programme gave a hint about what kind of pressure some opponents to the law were under.
For a background of the story, see previous articles in Stockholm News (links at the end of this article).
When riksdagen (the parliament) voted for the law at June 18 many people reacted against the massive pressure put on the individual, often young, parliamentarians who considered voting No to the law. As the situation was, the opposition would unanimous vote No, which meant it would be enough to stop the law if four members of parliament from the four parties in the government voted with the opposition. The documentary showed on some nasty aspects of the fact that Swedish parliamentarians are not elected as individuals but as representatives of a party.
They do not have any real mandate to vote according to their personal beliefs.
Fredrik Federley, a young parliamentarian from the Center party (green liberals) who has positioned himself as a defender of individual rights and liberal values cried during his speech in parliament when he said that he would vote yes.
In today´s Agenda in the Swedish state television some information came out about how 30 year old parliamentarian freshman Karl Sigfrid was persuaded to skip the voting. Sigfrid had informed his party the day before that he could not vote Yes to this law. When he attended a meeting with his party´s parliamentarians they did not try to convince him with arguments for the law itself.
The Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, and most of the parliamentarian group, flew out at Sigfrid. Reinfeldt said for example “You are the weak link in our governmental alliance, Karl”, “Shall a blast come from the inside?”, “Shall the Prime Minister, who represents our party, be shoot?”. Reinfeldt´s message was that Sigfrid alone could destroy the government´s chances to be reelected in 2010 if he voted against this law.
A third example of a young politician who did not want to vote for the law was Birgitta Ohlsson from Folkpartiet (socialliberal). She said in Agenda that she was informed that her most important fields (gender equality, development aid) would not be prioritised in the future if she voted No. She decided to not vote at all.
The government has lost a lot of its support on this issue, not least among their own liberal voters. So why did they push the issue so hard and why did they perform so poorly when trying to defend the law in debates? Maybe the other of last night´s documentaries gave a hint.
The director general of FRA, Ingvar Åkesson says that information is hard currency. To have access to information gives you the possibility to trade other information in exchange. This does perhaps not come as a surprise, but nobody has talked about it from the government´s office. It is controversial to talk about exchange of information with other countries. Instead they were rediculated when they claimed that the FRA law was essential for protecting the Swedish military forces in Afghanistan. The talibans hardly communicate by e-mails or SMS which pass the Swedish border was one of the arguments against the law.
Åkesson and the Minister for Defence, Sten Tolgfors both claimed in the program that Sweden only exchange information with democracies. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Carl Bildt confirmed however that it “might have happened (…) under strict control”, that information has been traded with countries that are not democracies. He modifies this statement on his blog, where he writes that it is wrong, as some media do, to conclude that Sweden has a permanent exchange of information with dictatorships. He writes that the discussion in the program was about a potential cooperation with Russia, “not a full-fledge democracy”with Bildt´s words, about information regarding spread of technologies for weapons of mass destruction.
Bildt writes that it is dishonest of the documentary to state that the information can end up anywhere in the world; but is that not exactly what happens once you give the information away? Then you loose control over who will get access to it further on.
I believe that the government is after all not a bunch of idiots. It makes sense that they want to trade information with other nations and that they find that possibility so important that it is worth all the political problems connected with it. They inherited the law proposal from the Social democrats who are now against it. The irony is that it might now bring the Social democrats back to power in 2010.
