Stockholm News has recently written about the new proposed legislation for storing information about air line passengers and about camera surveillance outside embassies and metro stations in Stockholm. Metro writes today about new EU-directive to store information about telephone and internet traffic and text messages.
From January 2009 all this kind of information shall be stored and available for the police during one year. Then it may be erased. The cost to start up the system in Sweden is estimated to around 220 million kronor, which will be paid by the telecommunication companies and in the end by the consumers. In some European countries the cost is taken by the state which critics say distorts the free competition.
The difficulty is to balance the police need to be efficient and fight criminality and terrorism on the one side and the personal integrity on the other. It seems however as the trend is going towards giving priority to the security matters before the integrity.