14 DAY TRIAL // A new NSA leak indicates that the American intelligence agency spied on Norway, where it collected some 33 million phone conversations in a single month, but the local authorities are denying this.
A new report published by the daily Dagbladet and based on Snowden files indicates that the NSA has collected millions of phone conversations over the span of a single month, something that’s been said about numerous other countries.
But the head of the Norwegian Intelligence Service denies the reports and says that they were the ones who actually did the spying and that the information published in the newspapers was actually something the country shared with the NSA.
“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,” said Lieutenant General Kjell Grandhagen, the chief of the local intelligence service, during a press conference.
“This was not data collection from Norway against Norway, but Norwegian data collection that it shared with the Americans,” he clarified.
On his Twitter page, Glenn Greenwald, one of the co-authors of the story, says that the files he has on the issue make it clear that it was actually the NSA doing the spying and not what the local intelligence service claims it to be.
The statement coming from the Norwegian authorities, however, falls in line with something the NSA director Keith Alexander has said several times over the past few months. In the cases of the reports on the NSA spying on France, Italy, and Spain, Alexander said that the assertions were false. “Both they and the person who stole the classified data did not understand what they were looking at,” he said, referring to the reporters handling the files and Edward Snowden.