I consider it completely and utterly unlikely. "I can not at all imagine in my imagination that the NSA would betray that trust. The latter remark may have inspired Edward Snowden to accuse the NSA of abusing these cooperations with foreign partner agencies to spy on European citizens, but as a source told Berlingske: Similar words can be found in an NSA presentation from 2011: "No US collection by Partner and No Host Country collection by US" - although this is followed by "there ARE exceptions!" Part of the agreement between the US and Denmark was that "the USA does not use the system against Danish citizens and companies. Map of the current backbone cables around the Danish capital CopenhagenĪnd the Sandagergård complex of the FE on the island of Amager The FE then reviews them - and checks that there are basically no Danes among them - and then enters the keywords" according to sources cited by Berlingske.īesides this filtering with keywords and selectors, the FE and the NSA will also have used the metadata for contact-chaining, which means reconstructing which phone numbers and e-mail addresses had been in contact with each other, in order to create social network graphs - something the sources apparently didn't want to disclose to Berlingske.
The filter system was not only fed by keywords from the FE, but the NSA also provided "the FE with a series of keywords that are relevant to the United States.
The US had paid for a cable between the two locations.Īt Sandagergård, the "NSA made sure to install the technology that made it possible to enter keywords and translate the huge amount of information, so-called raw data from the cable tapping, into "readable" information." The BND then tapped these cables with help from the NSA under operation Eikonal (2004-2008).īerlingske reported that the communications data that were extracted from the backbone cable in Copenhagen were sent from the Danish company's technical hub to the Sandagergård complex of the FE on the island of Amager. This Danish agreement is very similar to the Transit Agreement between the German foreign intelligence service BND and Deutsche Telekom, in which the latter agreed to provide access to international transit cables at its switching center in Frankfurt am Main. The agreement was prepared in only one copy, which was shown to the company and then locked in a safe at the FE's headquarters at the Kastellet fortress in Copenhagen, according to Berlingske. The company agreed, but only when it was approved at the highest level, and so the agreement was signed by prime minister Rasmussen, minister of defense Hækkerup and head of department Troldborg.īecause the cable contained international telecommunications it was considered to fall within the FE's foreign intelligence mandate. To make sure that tapping the cable was as legal as possible, the government asked approval of the private Danish company that operated the cable. Slide from an NSA presentation about RAMPART-A from October 2010 Under this program, which started in 1992, foreign partners provide access to high-capacity international fiber-optic cables, while the US provides the equipment for transport, processing and analysis:
The code name for this cooperation is not known, but it's most likely part of the NSA's umbrella program RAMPART-A. The cooperation was laid down in a document, which, according to Berlingske, all Danish defense ministers had to sign "so that any new minister could see that his predecessor - and his predecessors before his predecessors - with their signatures had been part of this small, exclusive circle of people who knew one of the kingdom's biggest secrets." And Nyrup, who was a sworn supporter of a close relationship with the US, said yes. The US government did not give up, and in a letter sent directly to the Danish prime minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, US president Clinton asked his Danish colleague to reconsider the decision. Tapping that cable, however, was almost impossible without the help of the Danes, so the NSA asked the FE for access to the cable, but this request was denied, according to Berlingske. In the mid-1990s, the NSA had found out that somewhere under Copenhagen there was a backbone cable containing phone calls, e-mails and text messages from and to countries like China and Russia, which was of great interest for the Americans. In an extensive piece from September 13, the renowned Danish newspaper Berlingske (founded in 1749) describes how the FE, in cooperation with the NSA, started to tap an international telecommunications cable in order to gather foreign intelligence. The Sandagergård complex of the FE on the island of Amager, where a newĭata center was built for its deployment of the XKEYSCORE system