Facebook had taken formidable steps in following Visa and Mastercard plans for the selling of personal information of their users to companies with ad-targeting purposes. However, the personal information that Facebook will store about its international users at servers located in the Swedish Arctic might be also target for intelligence gathering and transference to US Intelligence services. This, partly according to the new Swedish surveillance law (FRA lagen), and, partly due to the secret agreements between Swedish officials and US Intelligence services previously exposed by the WikiLeaks cables.
The Swedish government – according to the WikiLeaks disclosures – has promoted legislation to protect such US commercial interests at the direct request of the US Embassy in Stockholm. The Swedish government became also internationally notorious for their secret agreements with US Intelligence services (hidden from the Swedish Parliament) devised for the transference of personal and political information registered in Sweden.
Facebook has been recently srutinized in by an Irish data-protection authority on behalf of EU, which gave severe criticism. Facebook is now facing stop in the “harvesting” of personal information on shopping habits from the part of the European Commission, [2] or in general, of all information about Facebook users that can potentially transferred to corporate business (in the same fashion than colleagues Visa and Mastercard, see below) I wonder whether the information about Facebook international users that will pass or be stored in Sweden will also fall under “Intelligence material”.
In this case it is also a material subject to be included in the transference of sensitive information according to the secret agreements between Swedish government officials and US Intelligence services also disclosed by WikiLeaks. In this context it is worth mentioning that according to the new surveillance-legislation (FRA-lagen, also promoted by USA in Sweden) all the cyber information passing Sweden is subject to be targeted by the Swedish Intelligence apparatus. The law was approved in 2008 at the epoch in which the secret agreements between Sweden and USA Intelligence services was under discussion.
Visa and Mastercard retaliated against Wikileaks
In the context above, the London “Cyberspace” Conference – conveying a selected list of business and government executives including Facebook officials and the foreign ministers with interests in the extradition process against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (UK, Sweden and USA) – studied recently as principal theme (Part I of the Conference), “Economic Growth and Development – Realizing the benefits of a secure cyberspace for international economic growth and development and use of cyberspace as a prosperity multiplier.”
More Visa, more Mastercard, more business, more oil, more war, more profit, more greed. Nada WikiLeaks!
La lotta continua
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The PROFESSORS' BLOG – Science, Culture & Human Rights For All – It is now THE INDICTER magazine (Nov 2015) 