July 14, 2008: Sweden recently passed an electronic eavesdropping law that, they admitted, was mainly to enable Swedish intelligence agencies to comb through Russian data traffic and sell goodies to other nations. Because of Swedens location, both geographically and in terms of how Internet traffic flows, about 80 percent of Russian Internet traffic and phone calls pass through Sweden. Russia can avoid this by rerouting its communications, but this would take time, and lots of money. In any event, many of those other countries already have similar laws. Meanwhile, Sweden will grab all the Russian secrets they can.

In reality, the Swedes will not sell the Russian data, but will trade with other nations that are big in the data collection business (the U.S., Britain and Australia), who might have something of particular interest to Sweden. Having something to trade also enables Sweden to get warnings that they are being spied upon. The espionage business if often all about trading favors, and being known as someone who might have something useful to put on the table.