- The police in Sweden need more tools to be able to access and listen to the communication between serious criminals, says National Police Chief Anders Thornberg to Ekot, after several leading people in criminal networks were detained in investigations where part of the evidence is from the encrypted service Encrochat.
- According to the National Police Chief, this concerns both how the communication is stored, and how the police can read encrypted communication.
- Anders Thornberg says that one way could be for the FRA to get more resources to signal reconnaissance to the police, as there are people who continue to control crime in Sweden after having fled to Spain, for example.
The police in Sweden need more tools to be able to access and listen to the communication between serious criminals.
This is what National Police Chief Anders Thornberg tells Ekot, after several leading people in criminal networks were detained in investigations where part of the evidence is from the encrypted app Encrochat.
This shows how the police can work if you get access to communication, says Anders Thornberg.
– What we need to know is how criminals communicate – because they have to communicate before, during, and after crime – and preferably we want to access it before so we can prevent, as we could with Encrochat – we played on equal terms for for once, says National Police Chief Anders Thornberg.
In the second place, the police need to come years of communication in order to be able to solve crimes afterwards, he continues.
– If we can not prevent, we want to access them to be able to prosecute them afterwards. And then we have to access their communication – so it has to be stored to a certain extent, so it can be found afterwards. And it must be possible to read encrypted messages, against the absolute most serious crime.
It was last spring that French police cracked the encryption on the communication app Encrochat and shared the information with Swedish police. In the app, people connected to Swedish criminal networks openly discussed various criminal schemes – and through the information, the police state that they prevented murders and other serious violent crimes – and that they also received information that gave new insight into who leads and organizes crime in the criminal networks that used Encrochat.
According to Anders Thornberg, this shows that the police need to have better access to communication between criminals – this concerns both how communication is stored and the police’s ability to read encrypted information, according to the National Police Chief.
For about a year now, the police have been able to obtain permission for secret data reading in case of suspicion of a serious crime, where you can take part in certain communication by installing software. But that is not enough, says Anders Thornberg.
– There are chats, and new technical apps and things that come that are not really covered by these parts, he says.
According to Anders Thornberg, these are decisions that in some cases need to be made at EU level, in other cases nationally. He mentions, for example, the possibility of listening to communication between people in criminal networks without concrete criminal suspicion – if they can be assumed to engage in very serious crime.
Another way to gain access to more communication can be that FRA, the Swedish Armed Forces’ radio station, receives more resources for signal surveillance on behalf of the police, says the National Police Chief. The security policy situation and the terrorist threat mean that the resources at FRA today are very strained, he says.
– It could help us if they would get a little more dedicated resources that could help the police to read and listen to traffic directed at Sweden, partly when foreign groups support, but there are also many Swedes who have fled Sweden and are sitting for example in Spain or Thailand or elsewhere, and continue to pursue crime, which we could access, says National Police Chief Anders Thornberg.
Source: ICELAND NEWS