Today the Swedish government voted through another law that compromises our democratic tradition to accommodate other European countries that want to keep official state(-organ) information from their populace. Huzzah, Progress.
More info please?
One of the cornerstones of Swedish democracy is our system of "see-through-ity". Basically everything except military stuff is public information - every government decision, every letter sen to or within a state organisation, every court case and police investigation (though they're classified until after the court case), every economic receipt ("quittance"?), and so on. This is the reason all those Scientology books is now de facto in the public sphere - back when they were suing all those hackers to hell and back they sued a Swedish guy who responded by entering all their lierature into the case as "relevant evidence" (whatever the English or juridical term is), which means that it's now public information and anyone who wants can just ask the court for it and they have to share it with you.
Now, surprising noone, this level of transparency (yeah, I remembered the word now
) has obviously caused some ruffled feathers in other countries over the years. EU requires you to share a lot of stuff with other countries and supposedly a lot if that stuff counts as classified information in those countries which seizes to be classified the minute it touches a Swedish government branch. An example that were given was pharmaceutics - if the side effects of some medicine is classified in France, they still have to share the information with other EU countries, and when it comes to the Swedish Läkemedelsverket it turns into public information that anyone can read. Sweden has been getting criticism for this for years and years.
The effects of the law that was passed yesterday is pretty simple : it compromises this cornerstone of our democracy (and I do not exaggerate when I call it that - it is absolutely necessary for our kind of government to function and to root out corruption and it's very likely one of the main reasons our corruption level is so low to begin with) in such a way that at the tiniest squeak of objection from any foreign government official at any government level we'd be forced to classify information. And that makes me very angry and bitter. Rather than the EU following our example, Sweden is being pressured to make our system worse.
I didn't include any source since I doubt I can find any non-Swedish one, but I can try, if you want me to.