Sweden Scandal Highlights Cheap Romanian, Serbian IT Market

The Swedish government could face impeachment after Prime Minister Stefan Lofven admitted on Monday that Romanian, Czech and Serbian programmers without proper security clearance might have had access to the personal data of Swedish citizens - an incident that showed how low-cost Eastern European IT companies are increasingly being used by Western European countries.

Swedish premier Lofven confirmed at a press conference on Monday that his administration potentially exposed the personal information of millions of Sweden's citizens after the Swedish Transport Agency started outsourcing its database and IT service management to private companies like IBM in the Czech Republic and Romania and NCR in Serbia.

Romanian programmers told BIRN that the situation is quite common, because many multinational IT companies in Central and Western Europe use Eastern European subcontractors whose employees carry out the projects at cheaper rates.

However, they said, security conditions, even when the client is a multinational company rather than a government, are tight for the programmers because of fears that they might steal sensitive data.

An investigation by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter started to shed light on the case in mid-July.

The Swedish Transport Agency allegedly uploaded all of its data to IBM and NCR's cloud servers, where it was accessible to people outside Sweden who didn't have proper security clearance.

This information included all the details found on a vehicle registry: the names, photographs, and home addresses of millions of Swedish citizens, including information on thousands of people with protected identities working in the military or even Swedish intelligence.  

But while the Swedish government is...

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