14 DAY TRIAL // The NSA doesn’t work alone, that much has been clear over the past months with all the leaks getting published.
Well, this time around, it seems that Sweden is the one that aided the NSA in its effort to get information on Russian leaders. The country’s intelligence agency, the FRA, spied on Russian officials and shared the data with its American counterpart.
According to a report from Sweden’s Sveriges Television and signed, in part, by Glenn Greenwald, the FRA is seen as one of the NSA’s leading partners among foreign countries. “The FRA provided the NSA with a unique collection of data on high-priority Russian targets,” the file reads, mentioning the country’s leadership structure and domestic politics.
The document is dated April 18, 2013, which means that data from the FRA couldn’t have come too long before that.
The report doesn’t name any individuals or what Russian leaders they’re referring to, but it does mention that the agency’s cable access has resulted in unique SIGINT (signals intelligence) reports.
Previous reports coming from WikiLeaks, indicated that the FRA was able to monitor about 80 percent of Russia’s Internet traffic which passed through the country’s cables. The files published back in 2011 indicate the country even adopted a new wiretapping law to allow such practices.
Over the past six months, a number of reports have unveiled a lot of details about the NSA’s spying practices, as well as the agency’s partners from countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
The latest report indicates that the National Security Agency collects about 5 billion of cellphone location records daily through a program called “Co-Traveler.” This means that if you are in the range of the same cellphone tower as one of NSA’s targets as it moves around the globe, your data will also be collected in an effort to paint a clear picture of his or her whereabouts and associates.