Norway's Spy Boss Gives 'Least Untruthful' Answer About Sharing Phone Call Info With NSA, Before Correcting Himself

from the faster-turnaround-this-time,-though dept

More information has surfaced on the NSA's worldwide phone metadata collections. A leaked document provided to Norwegian paper Dagbladet shows that metadata on over 33 million Norwegian calls was collected in a single month.



As we've seen elsewhere, the first response has been outrage.

"Friends should not monitor each other," Norway's prime minister Erna Solberg told Norwegian broadcaster NRK on Tuesday. "It is legitimate to engage in intelligence, but it should be targeted and suspect based."



"It is unacceptable for allies to engage in intelligence against each other's political leadership," added justice minister Anders Anundsen...



According to Dagbladet, Norwegian phone companies NetCom and Telenor both deny giving the NSA access to their systems.



Torstein Olsen, head of Norway's telecoms regulator, said that it was illegal for anyone apart from telecommunications companies to collect such data.



"If Dagbladet's information is correct that 33 million mobile phone calls in Norway were registered by someone other than the telecommunication companies, that would be a crime under Norwegian law," he said.

The head of NIS, Norway's intelligence service, Lieutenant General Kjell Grandhagen, told Dagbladet that his agency had not collaborated with US to collect the data, and had been unaware that it was being collected.

"This is data collection by Norwegian intelligence to support Norwegian military operations in conflict areas abroad, or connected to the fight against terrorism, also abroad," Lieutenant General Kjell Grandhagen, head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, told a news conference.



"This was not data collection from Norway against Norway, but Norwegian data collection that is shared with the Americans."

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This is in line with the responses offered by other US allies who have been made aware of the NSA's efforts via Snowden's leaks. The ODNI hasn't even bothered offering a denial, perhaps suggesting it would rather deal with its domestic issues than fight the intelligence brushfires around the world. This lack of response may also be due to the fact that the NSA didn't collect this metadata directly.Whatinteresting about this is the Norwegian intelligence response. The head of the NIS (Norwegian intelligence) made two seemingly contradictory statements in under 24 hours.That's according to The Local . Reuters' coverage of the response to this new leak quotes the intelligence head as sayingwhen addressing a press conference.Grandhagen's "deniability" seems to hinge on being asked the right question in the right way. The first answer, given shortly after the leak, may have simply been the " least untruthful ." In some ways, the answer is true. The NIS doescollaborate with the NSA tothe data. It collects the data itself and thenit with the NSA. Grandhagen can honestly say he wasthe NSA wasthis data, because the NSA. The NIS was. Playing to the edges of the wording.The second answer seems to have been composed with a little more thought and is targeted more at dispelling domestic spying rumors than pretending it never happened.So, like other countries (France, Italy), these metadata collections are supposedly collections of calls into or out of the country, rather than solely domestic end-to-end calls. Supposedly. We've seen that the NSA's collections in the US gather plenty of metadata on solely domestic communications. Just as spokespersons are quick to assure offended countries that "everyone spies on other countries," those thinking more skeptically will be quick to respond with "and everyone says they're not spying on their own citizens, but they are."33 million calls from one country in one month -- no matter who's doing the collecting and who's on the "share" list -- is a massive amount of data. If the NSA is being supplied with the metadata on hundreds of millions of phone calls from around the world, in addition to the hundreds of millions it collects domestically every 90 days, there's no way it can credibly claim to have a handle on all this data.

Filed Under: metadata, norway, nsa, phone calls, surveillance