Sweden needs a German constitutional court

A constitutional court according to the German model would have been able to prevent Sweden's contentious new surveillance law, Detlef Quast, a visiting professor for information science at Nuremberg University, argues in the Swedish daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet. The law allows the Swedish secret service Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) to read all the electronic communication that crosses the Swedish border. "According to an internal FRA paper all correspondence must be read. ... Once this has been done the data is passed on to foreign intelligence services. This procedure is explicitly laid down in the draft law. ... We are financing the FRA with our taxes and paying telephone companies high fees so that they can put us under surveillance. ... A constitutional court like that in Germany, which prevents laws that violate people's personal integrity, would presumably have taken action against a law that restricts civic freedom as this law does."

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