FRA: "Show me the mooneeey!"

This might be somewhat old news (at least in this day and age) - but I just read that FRA, the National Defence Radio Establishment of Sweden, may get an extra budget of 200 million SEK to improve their monitoring technology. Why? Well, they need it to be able to also monitor communication through mobile applications such as Skype, Viber and Wordfeud (of course!).

You can Google-search “FRA law” for more information about the controversial law in Sweden if you haven’t heard of it before.

What do you think? Is this money well spent? And especially to all (none Swedish) students: What is your opinion about the Swedish FRA law?

I just find it a bit funny that they need these extra millions just to e.g. be able to monitor the popular game Wordfeud and even more so because of what technology they already posses. Back in November 2007, FRA bought a supercomputer from Hewlett Packard, which then was ranked as the 5^th most powerful supercomputer of the world. But hey, that was 4 years ago, and according to the organization TOP500’s ranking of November 2011 the computer is today only the 126^th most powerful supercomputer of the world. And honestly, who hasn’t bought a new computer the last 4 years?

Footnote: At #44 you find KTH's "Lindgren" with its 36384 processor cores, peaking at 305 teraflops.

Facebook, the FRA Law and Google

The legal issues surrounding the upcoming Facebook data center in Northern Sweden are starting to come up. Here's a snippet from The Register a week ago:

A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data.

What I find the most interesting in this is what Google has said and done around the issue. As you probably know they opted to build a data center in Finland. I don't know if they ever even considered Sweden but if you consider the fact that the net traffic from Finland towards Europe and onwards still goes via Sweden, it doesn't really make a difference which they choose as far as the FRA law is concerned.

I'm guessing the proximity to Russia is the real reason for choosing Hamina. The rest feels like a clever Machiavellian way to play the "Don't be evil" card to me.