Let Norwegian Säpo mass store posts

Let Norwegian Sapo mass store posts

Published: Just now

full screen Norway’s main opposition party Høyre wants to give the security police PST greater powers to store open information online. Here stands former Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs Ine Eriksen Søreide in the Storting. Archive image. Photo: Annika Byrde/NTB/TT

Norway’s security police PST should be allowed to mass store posts online, according to the newspaper VG, the largest opposition party Høyre.

The party proposes a legislative package where PST is allowed to vacuum, among other things, comment fields, blogs and databases with public access. They must then be able to analyze the information on a broad front and store it over a longer period of time.

– We are in a demanding security policy situation. Therefore, we want to give PST some new powers and opportunities to reveal threats to society, says Ine Eriksen Søreide, member of the Storting and former foreign minister, to VG.

The proposal package also includes making it possible to prosecute people who are judged to be trying to influence public debate on behalf of a foreign power.

When Høyre was in government, proposals like these were put out for consultation. Then they faced great criticism, including from the supervisory authority Datatilsynet, which warned that such monitoring would affect how open people dare to be online.

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