Report: Danish Secret Service Helped NSA Spy On European Politicians

The U.S. Nationwide Safety Company (NSA) used a partnership with Denmark’s overseas and navy intelligence service to listen in on prime politicians and high-ranking officers in Germany, Sweden, Norway, and France by tapping into Danish underwater web cables between 2012 and 2014.

Particulars of the covert wiretapping have been broken by Copenhagen-based public broadcaster DR over the weekend primarily based on interviews with 9 unnamed sources, all of whom are stated to have entry to labeled data held by the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste or FE).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the then-German International Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and the opposition chief on the time, Peer Steinbrück, are stated to have been focused by means of the Danish-American pact.

Utilizing the phone numbers of politicians as search parameters, the report alleged that the NSA “intercepted the whole lot from textual content messages to telephone calls that handed by means of the cables on their technique to and from the telephones of politicians and officers.”

The spying operation concerned deploying a particular technical software program known as XKeyscore in a knowledge middle positioned at Sandagergårdan within the metropolis of Dragoør to look and analyze information streams flowing out and in of the web cables. XKeyScore is a data-retrieval system that allows limitless surveillance of individuals anyplace on the earth, permitting the intelligence company to trace people, learn emails, and pay attention to their phone calls and searching histories.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

However in 2014, following issues that the NSA had abused the collaboration with FE to spy on targets in Denmark and its neighbors, the Danish counterpart established a secret inner working group with 4 hackers and analysts — beneath the codename “Operation Dunhammer” — to look at the partnership.

The newest spherical of revelations is the results of a 2015 report that the working group offered to the FE, which additionally discovered that Danish intelligence helped the U.S. company spy on Danish overseas and finance ministries in addition to a weapons producer, in the end forcing the federal government to droop the top of the FE and three different officers in August 2020.

U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, who beforehand made public a trove of classified information revealing alleged tapping of the German chancellor’s telephone by the NSA in October 2013, accused U.S. President Joe Biden of being “deeply concerned on this scandal the primary time round”. Germany dropped its investigation into the phone-tapping incident in June 2015 citing lack of proof.

“There needs to be an express requirement for full public disclosure not solely from Denmark, however their senior accomplice as properly,” Snowden tweeted.