> You should probably point out that it was the left wing surveilling each other. More specifically it was the Socialist Labour party (AP) which conducted surveillance of the communist AKP-ML (and NKP) for the reason of being in control of the left-wing agenda in Norway.

AP is centrist social democrats, and while an AP government started the surveillance, it continued through governments that included every single one of the right wing and centre-right parties. It's misleading to suggest it was "just" one left wing party keeping an eye on the others.

> Considering that AKP-ML

... notably the security services never managed to prove that they constituted a threat in any way - if they had, they'd had justification under the law to carry out legal surveillance of them. Their "training" consisted pretty much of running around in the forest with toy weapons - you get much more relevant training as part of the compulsory conscription (at least back then when most men did serve).

It was right to keep an eye on them given the company they kept, but there was never any legitimate basis for more, as the total lack of evidence of anything criminal even despite the invasive illegal surveillance they were subject to found.

But focusing on AKP is also misleading in that they were by far the smallest of the groups subject to illegal surveillance. By the early 90's -
when they were still subject to various surveillance - they were (as were NKP) down to a membership of about ~500 or so (for AKP my knowledge of that is indirect; for NKP I saw their data first hand at the time).. SF/SV surpassed both of them in size very early on (the different trajectories was one reason why the attempt at merging SF and NKP failed - NKP pushed for too much influence relative to their declining membership base, and the trends continued on both sides.

Both AKP and NKP merited surveillance at various points, and SF probably did too for a short while, but the important point is that we know from the illegal surveillance that the illegal surveillance never uncovered evidence that they actually posed any risks, and we know that it uncovered nothing of note that wouldn't have been uncovered with legal surveillance. That is the big problem - they kept up invasive surveillance for decades even after their own results showed it served no purpose, and escalated it to the point of openly harassing people.

If anything, the evidence is clear that the Soviets for example focused on people with ties to AP, because they were the ones with power, and much more useful.

As for AKPs various sympathies, they certainly had "contact" with lots of nasty groups, but having met people that were centrally involved in AKP at the time, it's pretty clear most of their "contact" with various groups was severely exaggerated - they were much less prominent than they wanted people to think. But the security services would have known this given the level of surveillance they were under. They'd have known with just legal surveillance too.

They were academics that talked a lot and did little, and were idealists with wildly unrealistic ideas about how the rest of the world worked. A story that illustrates just how naive they were involves when they sent a delegation to Albania, which under Enver Hoxha was the "shining light" of Europe for the Maoists. But the problem was most of them at the time were hippies and had long hair, and Albania did not tolerate long hair on men at the time. So they had to cut it at the airport. But then the border guards refused to let them in as their passport photos no longer matched their appearance, so the delegation was not allowed entry and had to return. That's the type of thing that happens to unwanted groupies, not well respected guests.. I have no reason to doubt that story, as I heard it told in front of one of the people that was part of said delegation, and he did not correct any of it.

The worst part given this that for all the security services obsession with the small left wing groups, the vast majority of political violence in Norway during the entire period was from the far right directed at the left (the exception being some violence directed at neo nazis predominantly by anarchist groups tied to Blitz). AKP in particular was the victim of multiple terror incidents, and e.g. the security services have in retrospect admitted they for example made use of the firebombing of one of AKPs book stores as an excuse to go through AKP documents under the guise of investigating it, rather than focus on solving the crime. When AKP claimed that documents had gone missing at the time, they were ridiculed for it in the media, because "everyone" blindly accepted the police claims that nobody would that.

What we've seen is that the illegal surveillance has validated strongly that the laws were flexible enough as they were: The illegal surveillance uncovered no risks that there's any indication would not have been known if they had stuck to the legal surveillance. Meanwhile the far right went basically unchecked in the 70's and 80's until the level of violence escalated too far to be possible to ignore. It took years to establish the same kind of overview of the neo nazi groups that were actually violent as they had on a continuous basis for irrelevant pretend-revolutionaries who never posed a threat.

But if they'd stuck to the law they'd have been unable to e.g. harass people in public by telling them to their face how they'd taken all privacy away from them.