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Comment by effn | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that Facebook's European datacenter is in Sweden so a large part of Facebook traffic passes Swedish borders.

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> It's worth noting that Facebook's European datacenter is in Sweden so a large part of Facebook traffic passes Swedish borders

It's also worth noting that Google said in 2007 that if the FRA snoop law is passed, they will locate their servers outside Sweden. They placed them in Finland instead.

Peter Fleischer from Google said "By introducing these new measures, the Swedish government is following the examples set by governments ranging from China and Saudi Arabia to the US government’s widely criticised eavesdropping programme. Do Swedish citizens really want their country to have the most aggressive government surveillance laws in Europe?" http://peterfleischer.blogspot.se/2007/05/sweden-and-governm... http://internetworld.idg.se/2.1006/1.109576

Facebook knew they would be listened to, but put their datacenter in Sweden anyway. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/31/facebook_swedish_dat...

It's also worth noting that Google said in 2007 that if the FRA snoop law is passed, they will locate their servers outside Sweden. They placed them in Finland instead.

Doesn't really help when almost all international Internet traffic from/to Finland goes through Sweden...

It does the encrypted parts.

But the encrypted parts would be safe from eavesdropping even if hosted in Sweden, no? If that's the case, hosting it in Finland makes zero difference apart from political pressure.

but encrypted..

Do we know they don't have access to the private keys?

Those would be supplied only by facebook, so in that respect it wouldn't matter where the servers are.

Sweden has no realistic leverage here. Why would a foreign company wanting to host something there give out those when there are alternatives? (Like, say, Iceland.)

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