Det handlar om det svenska rättssystemet och Ericsson är en nationell säkerhetsfråga för USA!

Secret government eavesdropping has a long history in
Scandinavia. By virtue of its position on Europe’s northern
flank with Russia and the east, the Scandinavian Peninsula
was crucial to Western intelligence officials during the
cold war, and both Norway and Sweden developed
sophisticated signals intelligence programs. According to
NSA documents, the US agency has had close ties to
Norwegian intelligence as far back as the 1950s. With
Norway’s position as NATO’s northern bridgehead against
the East, the relationship continued until the Gorbachev
period. A Norwegian newspaper recently described a
listening post in Vardø, in the far north of the country
along Norway’s border with Russia, as a “giant ear to the
east.”

But the NSA’s relationship with Sweden may be the most interesting. Though officially neutral, Sweden in fact built very
close ties to both NATO and the US security establishment in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was deeply involved in cold
war spying operations. Among the intelligence agencies, the Swedes were noted for their technical prowess. According to the
Norwegian journalist and intelligence historian Alf Jacobsen, in the 1970s and 1980s, the FRA used the Swedish embassy in
Helsinki to intercept Soviet military and diplomatic communications, using equipment provided by the NSA; and working
for the CIA, the Swedes successfully broke the diplomatic codes of numerous countries, including Brazil, Zaire, China, Iran,
Turkey, Japan, and Czechoslovakia.

In recent years, geographical proximity to Russia and the development of the Internet have provided new reasons for Sweden
to maintain its technical edge: there are very few undersea fiber optic cables connecting Russia to the outside world—just
six, according to the cable-monitoring organization TeleGeography, out of more than three hundred around the world—and
the principal ones pass under the Baltic Sea. In July 2008, when Sweden passed its surveillance law, a diplomatic cable from
the US embassy in Stockholm, later published by WikiLeaks, noted that, since “80 percent of Russia’s foreign cable-based
communications flow through Sweden, the law legalizes Sweden’s monitoring of the majority of Russia’s trans-border
communications.”

With the Russian military posing increasing threats against NATO allies since the war in Ukraine, such spying has become
even more important. Much as during the cold war, there are frequent reports in the Swedish press about Russian submarine
and military activity in the region, and growing calls for a tightened military alliance with NATO and the United States. (In
2015, Sweden joined NATO’s Cyber Defense Center, a research and training facility in Tallinn, Estonia, and in June 2016,
Sweden signed a new “statement of intent” with the Pentagon, aimed at tightening a defense alliance.)

However, the recent completion of a Finnish undersea cable system called Sea Lion, which routes Internet traffic from
Finland directly to Germany, may allow many Russian communications to bypass Sweden. This fall, the Finnish government
began discussing surveillance legislation of its own, aimed in part at gaining access to the new cable data. Some Western
security analysts now view the Baltic Sea as a main theater in a new cyberwarfare arms race. In October 2015, The New York
Times reported that Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global
Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians
might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.