Swedish security services intercept 80 percent of Russian internet traffic and share the gathered information with the United States, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said in an interview with Britain’s New Internationalist magazine.
"The FRA [Forsvarets Radioanstalt], which is the big spy agency in Sweden, intercepts 80 per cent of Russian internet traffic and they sell it on to the national security agency in the US,” Assange told the magazine.
“There’s no longer a need to select who you intercept – you intercept everyone and you permanently record the whole thing, and then if sometime in the future you become interested in someone, you have the whole archive of all their communications and you understand who they are and who their friends are,” he said. “It’s a kind of coming totalitarian surveillance state.”
The 40-year-old Australian is currently being held under house arrest in Britain facing a possible extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted on sex crime charges.
Assange has denied the accusations against him and described the case as politically motivated.
