According to Hans Harding of the Prosecutor's Office, this is mainly due to the fact that criminals today are increasingly communicating with each other via regular telephone calls. To avoid being detected, they use various mobile phone applications, such as Signal, Wire, FaceTime, Instagram, etc., where the information is encrypted and almost impossible to intercept.
"There are numbers that indicate that 90 percent of such communication cannot be intercepted because of the encryption," Hans Harding said.
This leads to police resorting to other methods, like bugging rooms or monitoring other electronic communications, such as emails or SMS. The Prosecutor's Office is striving to figure out a legal way to intercept encrypted messages after a government investigation into this matter to be presented later this year. Regardless of the outcome, this won't solve the police's problems, as many people specifically choose encryption, such as journalists and their sources.
"Just take journalists as an example, there are rules already in place that prohibit us from listening to such conversations," Hans Harding said.
"In recent times, we have seen many criminals log off social media. They are quitting Facebook and the like in order to leave as few digital tracks as possible," Stockholm investigator Jan Flygar told Swedish Radio.
According to Jan Flygar, the criminals are constantly adapting to the police's investigation methods to avoid being caught next time.
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