Försvarets radioanstalt

On April 24, 2013, just weeks before Edward Snowden went public with his leaks about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, General Keith B. Alexander, then the head of the NSA, welcomed a group of Swedish intelligence officials to a secret three-day meeting at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. In the delegation were Ingvar Åkesson, the longtime director of Sweden’s National Defense Radio Establishment (known as the FRA, for Försvarets radioanstalt), a shadowy Swedish government intelligence agency, and five members of Åkesson’s senior staff. One of the aims of the meeting was to discuss Sweden’s growing importance to the NSA.

In a 2008 law, the FRA had been given expansive powers by the Swedish government to vacuum up all communications traveling over fiber optic networks into and out of Sweden—including e-mails, text messages, and telephone calls.(...)In 2011, the Swedes began sharing their surveillance data with the nsa, which included--as NSA officials described it at the time of the meeting--a "unique collection [of communications data] on high-priority Russian targets such as leadership, internal politics, and energy."

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Noting the Swedish spy agency’s unusual technical abilities and reputation for secrecy, NSA officials also viewed it as an ideal collaborator on its hacking and cyberwarfare project, called Quantum. One of the Quantum programs was an ambitious operation called WINTERLIGHT, which aimed at secretly hacking into high-value foreign computers and computer networks to obtain not only communications data but also any information stored on the hard drives or servers in question.

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According to NSA documents, WINTERLIGHT was using a complex attack strategy to secretly implant a malware program on the targeted computer or network. The NSA’s malware would then divert any signals between those computers and the Internet through “rogue” high-speed surveillance servers, called “FoxAcid” servers, allowing the NSA to access in stealth almost any of the user’s personal data—and even to tamper with data traveling from one user to another. The implications for both spying and offensive cyber operations were far-reaching.

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NSA officials describe their Swedish counterparts as “extremely competent, technically innovative, and trusted,” and praised them for being “proficient in collecting a wide variety of communications.” Notably, the Swedish FRA had been given access to the NSA’s most powerful analytic tool, called XKeyscore, which, according to nsa documents, enables the retrieval from mass surveillance data of “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.”

The NSA further noted in its April 2013 report that the FRA “continues to gain access to more data from additional telecommunications companies” and that new Swedish legislation had also given the FRA expanded counterterrorism powers. According to the American agency, the broad leeway given to the FRA had made Sweden a more reliable surveillance ally than Great Britain. One document about the NSA’s WINTERLIGHT program reports that “continued GCHQ involvement may be in jeopardy due to British legal/policy restrictions, and in fact NSA’s goal all along has been…a bilat[eral arrangement] with the Swedish partner.”

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In the account that emerged in the British and American press, the NSA and GCHQ programs were generally portrayed as dangerous aberrations—cases of vast intelligence overreach by the two most powerful governments in the Western alliance. (...) But what if some European governments were themselves pursuing bulk data collection on private citizens, using the exact same methods—and perhaps with even less oversight?

Jst je 9. jan 2017 ob 23:19 izjavil:

Preberite si History na wikiju. To knjigo sem jaz bral! Tisti profesor je bil car. Sicer se ne spomnim detajlov, ampak je sam v parih tednih zlomil G-schreiber (wiki: 893,622,318,929,520,960 different crypto key settings) z možgani, pisalom in papirjem. Damn, če bi imel veliko časa, bi jo spet bral. (Takrat mislim, da je nisem prebral do konca ali je bila pa druga knjiga in o tem človeku samo eno poglavje.)

Pac-Man je 9. jan 2017 ob 22:56 izjavil:

a
According to NSA documents, WINTERLIGHT was using a complex attack strategy to secretly implant a malware program on the targeted computer or network. The NSA’s malware would then divert any signals between those computers and the Internet through “rogue” high-speed surveillance servers, called “FoxAcid” servers, allowing the NSA to access in stealth almost any of the user’s personal data—and even to tamper with data traveling from one user to another. The implications for both spying and offensive cyber operations were far-reaching.