What is that task of FRA, and what should the police do?

This article in Sydsvenskan (in Swedish) ask the correct question: What is the task of FRA and what is the task of the police? In Sweden today, FRA is the organisation that have the ability to “wiretap” communication that crosses the boundary of Sweden. The police on the other hand is the one that wiretap communication internal in Sweden, between for example two parties in Sweden. The police can not wiretap without a court order though. This because we think it is important for integrity and privacy reasons.

But when FRA start to wiretap wires that crosses the boundary of Sweden, they will also collect data of communication between entities in Sweden where the communication happen to go out of Sweden and in again. Of course the proposal say that FRA must destroy that information immediately, but still. Is the boundary between what FRA do and the police do more unclear if the proposal is implemented than not? Do we want a new regulation without discussing the underlying issues?

People not knowing the history of this proposal should know that in reality we have three proposals we are discussing in Sweden at the moment: Implementation of the European Directive on Data Retention, Extension of the ability for FRA to wiretap also wires crossing the country boundary and Extension for the ability for the police to wiretap things like the Internet. Of course the descriptions are a bit fuzzy.

The problem I see is that we are working on how to implement all of these without any explicit coordination between them. This lack of coordination will have impact on everything from how it is implemented technically, via the questions on who pays for the implementation, who has to implement it, to integrity issues. I doubt the integrity questions will be explained even in the same context now when the three proposals are so diverse.

That said, I am personally a member of the investigation that implement the data retention directive, and I do the best I can to minimize the confusion. I also think both the police and the operators do a good job. I just hope we are not too late, and that the people working with the two other proposals are aware of the potential problems.

I am mostly worried about the FRA proposal, as it is managed by the Department of Defence and not Department of Justice like the two others.