Norway Used NSA Technology for Potentially Illegal Spying

https://theintercept.com/2018/03/01/norway-nsa-victory-garden-surveillance/

by georgecmu • 8 years ago

192 64 8 years ago

theintercept.com

sigmar• 8 years ago

"Potentially" from the headline was was dropped from the title.

strictnein4• 8 years ago

And not "Norway Potentially Used NSA Tech..." but "Norway Used NSA Tech for Potentially Illegal Spying".

Scipio_Afri• 8 years ago

The intercept is known for previously having some sensationalist in an anti-surveillance and anti-US way

As for the title here being edited by mods to further be more sensational, Ycombinator has interesting backers. See previous discussion about ycombinator and other tech companies having funding from Russian oligarchs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15631084

sctb• 8 years ago

Thanks, we've reverted the title to that of the article.

45h34jh53k4j• 8 years ago

There is no illegal spying. There cannot by definition be illegal spying, as if you are caught, it is retroactively made legal. Go back to sleep.

castis• 8 years ago

You're telling people to go back to sleep, we should be telling you to wake up.

unit91• 8 years ago

I think your sarcasm detector is malfunctioning this morning.

fenwick67• 8 years ago

Yeah this irony always gets me. Like yeah Cointelpro was "illegal" but also they did it and got away with it regardless. You can say it's illegal but that doesn't change that the intelligence agencies don't care.

coding123• 8 years ago

So I can go into the president's bushes and spy on him. If I'm caught surely he would understand that by definition I was doing something legal.

strictnein4• 8 years ago

"Despite a hefty price tag of more than $33 million paid by Norwegian taxpayers, the Norwegian Intelligence Service has kept the operations at the site beyond public scrutiny"

They wouldn't be much of an intelligence agency if they didn't.

fhood• 8 years ago

Also, is 30 million really a hefty price tag? I know I shouldn't judge based on American intelligence spending, but 30 million is what it cost to build my counties vocational tech school.

varjag2• 8 years ago

To put it into perspective, Norwegian parliament has spent ~300 million USD (and counting) on its renovation project..

fjsolwmv4• 8 years ago

Why must intelligence be secret?

strictnein4• 8 years ago

Why doesn't Apple release their internal roadmap? Because others would take advantage of that information.

Same thing with intelligence. People don't know your gaps in intelligence gathering if it's all secret. If they do, they'd take advantage of of that information and just work around them.

linkmotif• 8 years ago

Why must secrets be kept secret?

refurb• 8 years ago

Because if it's not secret, it's public information and not intelligence anymore?

sleepyhead3• 8 years ago

We just spent $250 million on a garage for our members of parliament so I don't think another $33 millions is such a big issue.

mtgx3• 8 years ago

So you're saying intelligence agencies should be run outside of all scrutiny and oversight?

strictnein4• 8 years ago

Nope. And you know I wasn't saying that. The bit I quoted says "public scrutiny".

freekh• 8 years ago

I am disappointed beyond words. If they indeed surveiled Norwegian citizens I except all responsible will be severely punished and that examples are made. These days I feel examples are made of people that did much less to impact personal freedom and democracy. Obviously the Rechtsstaat has cumbled already... I believed Norway to be above such dystopian practices. </rage>

vidarh2• 8 years ago

Why would you think that? It was a "public secret" in Norway for decades that the security services engaged in illegal surveillance mostly of the Norwegian left wing. E.g. I have personally talked to people who were the subject of surveillance well in excess of what the law allowed - one was a trade union organizer and member of the communist party that was followed to and from work every day for many years - his only explanation (after all they did not put every member of the communist party under surveillance) was that his route to work led past the Soviet embassy.

Another was the longtime editor of the communist newspaper Friheten ("Freedom"), Arne Jørgensen [1], who told me about how he for a period regularly had agents of the security services stop him in the streets to rattle him by e.g. commenting on details of private conversations he had the previous day with his wife at home.

This was reported regularly for years, but was laughed off as conspiracy theories, until it got a point where it could not be denied any more, and the Lund report[2] revealed extensive illegal surveillance.

Former prime minister Willoch defended the illegal surveillance against e.g. AKP-ML (Maoists ) with arguing they were an illegal organization. But no decision to outlaw them have ever been made.

During the writing of the Lund report, it became clear that one of the members, Berge Furre [3], a theologian and former Socialist Left (SV) politician, was still under illegal surveillance during his work on the report into the illegal surveillance.

None of the people involved were charged with anything. The security services changed name from POT to PST, and everything else remained largely unchanged.

Years later, when the first reports of Norwegian complicity in NSA surveillance was reported, the paper that reported it was pushed into a retraction after Grandhagen, the then leader of the notoriously tight-lipped military sercurity service uncharacteristically "took the blame" for reported surveillance that for every other country in the same document had turned out to be civilian surveillance of their own citizens, and claimed that Norway was somehow feeding the NSA metadata on phone conversations in Afghanistan of a volume that meant Norway somehow must be tapping every phoneline in the country.

Nobody in the press admitted to asking follow up questions about why military intelligence would suddenly gie out details like that, nor about why the US would be interested given reports that the US at the time themselves did not just capture meta data, but full voice recordings from Afghanistan.

Nobody reacted. Both Dagbladet and Aftenposten (major newspapers) deleted a slew of comments in their forums asking why nobody had asked questions about this of Grandhagen.

Like with the surveillance uncovered by the Lund report, any questions about this now gets met just with a shrug.

Then a couple of years ago, Aftenposten reported about a lot of unregistered IMSI catchers in Oslo. Again the intelligence services just insisted they were looking into it, after which the IMSI catchers "disappeared".

There's decades of history of this bullshit in Norway, and decades of experience showing that most people just refuse to question the official stories until things like the Lund report, and then go back to quietly accepting the official stories.

Part of it is probably that it has been relatively benign in Norway. No secret prisons, very little government interference in the press, etc. - it's mostly been just surveillance, so few people have been affected, and those who have been affected have been far out on the political fringes.

But I see no reason why that would change now.

[1] Norwegian wikipedia entry as I don't think he's covered in the English one: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arne_J%C3%B8rgensen_(redakt%C3...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berge_Furre

fyrstenberg2• 8 years ago

security services engaged in illegal surveillance mostly of the Norwegian left wing.

IMO how you put it is perhaps a bit misleading -

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.

Considering that AKP-ML was part of the stay-behind groups, known as "Gladio" (something that ironically (?) sprung out of NATO [0]), armed and trained PLO and marxist revolutionaries in Israel, and had networking with other similar ideological extreme radical left groups such as Red Army Fraction (Germany, Japan, Italy), Black Panthers and Weather Underground in the US, as well as IRA in Ireland and close ties with Pol Pot[1] and other groups in Asia. And they were actually planning armed revolution in Norway - the surveillance was called for (ref. Willoch). However, the labour party's close ties with the IC and media in Norway was peculiar (at the time there were only a single national government owned TV/radio broadcaster, NRK, rooted in the labour party) and these three "fractions" held meetings frequently.

No secret prisons

Partly correct - in Norway some people were thrown into mental hospitals instead. A famous case would the Kaare Torvholm [2] case which got arrested, together with the sheriff and a deputy (the equivalent of) and sent to mental institution which lead a local newspaper to raise the question if a "schizophrenic epidemic" had reached the shores (later picked up by VG, a national newspaper). This for reporting discrepancies with money (pension funds and more) in the fishing industry which was used as part of intelligence networks (at the time).

As the original thread topic:

Norwegian military has been conducting surveillance for a long time, illegally and including Norwegian citizens. The process right now is to push through laws which allows for this sort of surveillance (and let them keep the data they have, which is already shared with US and UK). These laws will just "harmonize" the Norwegian laws to those of the UK and partly US. These operations centers are located several places, not just in this region, but from the west of Norway (Haakonsvern) to Troms in the north (Setermoen) and involves what is called "svarte operasjoner" ("black ops" in English). One of these operations got public attention some years ago when it was revealed that they were spying on the King's email traffic [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

[1] https://cambodiatokampuchea.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/norwegi...

[2] https://www.fiskersiden.no/forum/index.php?/topic/22444-fisk...

[2] http://detsomstatennorgeskjuler.origo.no/-/bulletin/show/548...

[3] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/forsvaret/forsvaret-bekl...

erokar• 8 years ago

If i know my fellow countrymen, most people in Norway will shrug this off. That is if the news reach them at all -- I haven't seen this reported in any Norwegian mainstream media so far. We live in discouraging times.

eivarv• 8 years ago

NRK (government-owned broadcasting corp. - about as "mainstream" as it gets) covered it yesterday [0], and has published comments [1-2] today.

[0] https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/xl/antennene-som-samler-inn-da...

[1] https://www.nrk.no/ytring/sviket-mot-grunnloven-1.13940422

[2] https://www.nrk.no/ytring/e-tjenesten-folger-norsk-lov-1.139...

Neuron4ger• 8 years ago

To be fair, neither VG, Dagbladet or TV2 have covered this, at all. These are all major news agencies.

sleepyhead3• 8 years ago

From the article: "In partnership with NRK" (Norwegian public broadcaster).

dalbasal4• 8 years ago

Indiscriminate dragnets are essentially standard tools, possibly the primary tools, of signals intelligence these days.

They’re, well… indiscriminate. Since intelligence operates in secret, I think it’s fairly disingenuous to consider their use governed by guidelines about who can be spied on. You don’t even know who the person is, until you’ve already spied. All oversight will be conducted in secrecy, and we already know that in the US, the NSA they made a mockery of the concept.

We could ban the dragnets entirely, but I can’t see many militaries agreeing to handicap themselves relative to adversaries who will continue to use them. The very best a Norwegian could hope for at a long shot is that Norway won't spy on them, but Norway's allies will and share the intelligence. Also, every other country in the world (and private companies) will be spying on them.

I think this may be a lost fight.

fjsolwmv4• 8 years ago

That argument is weak. It's equivalent to saying I should kill some people because my adversaries kill people. That's nonsense because the situation isn't symmetrical. It's not the adversaries who are getting killed.

dalbasal4• 8 years ago

I'm not sure I'm following, at least one of us is misunderstanding the other.

I'm not making a normative statement. I'm saying that [1] (for example), Russia will not deny itself a tool that China pocesses and [2] when it comes to dragnets, I have very little confidence in mechanisms to separate citizens from foreigners. Even if I'm wrong and it is possible to regulate dragnets in this way, you are then spied on by everyone but your own government (which is better than nothing, but not exactly inspiring).

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

I have no problem with using dragnets to identify and disrupt activities that threaten national security.

I have a very big problem with the use of dragnets to get convictions in court by circumventing people's rights.

I don't see the need banning dragnets as a realistic option.

We need is a much stronger interpretation of fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.

FWIW a metadata dragnet/haystack can be used to search for parallel construction needles the same way it's used to search for terrorist or insider trading needles, all three are just varying types people working together to get something done in secret. I'm not sure how to make incentives align so that actually works out in practice but it's technically feasible.

testvox2• 8 years ago

But governments have shown they cannot be trusted to do this. One of the big arguments on favor of allowing mass surveillance was that it was only to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, which quickly got expanded to domestic terrorism purposes and today data gathered from dragnet programs is accessable and used in the investigation and sometimes even prosecution of normal domestic crimes in both the US and UK.

dalbasal4• 8 years ago

I have a very big problem with the use of dragnets to get convictions in court by circumventing people's rights.

This is doable, I think. It's kind of the case now, and all it would take is a momentary parliamentary majority to enshrine it. But, it's honestly hard to see a consistent legal/theoretical justification for it, if all the data is sitting on a government server.

Are you saying that a court/prosecutor should not be able to demand someone's emails? What if they could be used to exonerate?

Somehow, I just think that once these datasets exist (they do) we will eventually get used to them.

fyrstenberg2• 8 years ago

Dragnets is a huge problem for analysts. Traditional analysis is based on a certain amount of "degrees", 1. degree would persons/network directly associated with a target, then usually would never exceed 2. or 3. degree.

Now that everything is collected it causes problems with the amount of data which causes quality data to drown in the amount. You basically don't get to pick up anything of worth before it's too late.

This again (the perceived lack of finding "terrorists") is used to argue for more budgets and "tools". Some say this is on purpose and I wouldn't disagree.

My 2 cents.

ancorevard2• 8 years ago

This may not be illegal at all. Like all other countries, we have foreigners living in Norway. A small subset of these are bad actors. Most notable we have a history of Russian agents and ISIS members in the country. Intercepting all communications filtering for these non-Norwegian citizens/terrorists is not illegal.

fjsolwmv4• 8 years ago

That's one controversial interpretation that claims collecting citizen data doesn't count if you don't really mean it.

ancorevard2• 8 years ago

They are legally obligated to monitor all communications from and to a foreign country originated by a foreigner in Norway. The dragnet approach, monitoring all in order to filter down, seems reasonable as long as they only store the filtered data and not full stream.

johnhenry• 8 years ago

Good point. While I'm grateful for the information, and I don't think that they meant any harm, but the OP does us a disservice by dropping the word "Potential" from the title.

sleepyhead3• 8 years ago

According to this well-known lawyer it is not only illegal but in breach of the constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=no&tl=en&js=y&prev...

e12e3• 8 years ago

You forgot mossad assassins.

That doesn't mean this is legal; much like in other countries military intelligence have no jurisdiction over citizens - there are separate domestic agencies for that (the FBI/CIA, MI5/MI6 distinction).

drharby• 8 years ago

MI may have jurisdiction - dictatorships come to mind.

Pedantic i know, but what can?

mtgx3• 8 years ago

How do you know they only "filter for non-Norwegians"? According to some people in this thread, the intelligence agencies should operate in complete secrecy.

willstrafach2• 8 years ago

This article is about aiming ground based satellite dishes at foreign satellites and decoding the signals they see.

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

I don't think OP made that claim - merely that if that is how they were operating with the dragnet, it would not be illegal.

willstrafach2• 8 years ago

Can anyone with better knowledge of satellite tech explain why exactly this article mentions use against Norwegians and draws a parallel with illegal spying?

The source documents they provide seem to be about targeting satellite traffic (Inmarsat, RU civ/mil traffic, etc) from certain foreign satellites.

Norway Used NSA Technology for Potentially Illegal Spying

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