Norway’s Intel Chief Exposes Yet Another Greenwald Distortion
Glenn Greenwald’s latest story extracted from the NSA documents stolen by Edward Snowden is yet another example of how he distorts the information to smear the US — every time.
His article for Dagbladet claims that the NSA spied on “33 million” Norwegian telephone calls, but Norway’s chief of military intelligence says the claim is totally false. In fact, the telephone metadata discussed in Greenwald’s story was collected by Norwegian intelligence and shared with the NSA — and it was not even collected in Norway.
OSLO, Norway — Norway’s military intelligence chief said Tuesday his country carries out surveillance on millions of phone calls in conflict areas around the world and shares that data with allies, including the United States.
Lt. Gen. Kjell Grandhagen made the statement at a hastily organized news conference called in response to a story in the tabloid Dagbladet, which reported that 33 million Norwegian phone calls had been monitored by the U.S. National Security Agency.
Grandhagen vigorously denied the story.
“We had to correct that picture because we know that this in fact is not about surveillance in Norway or against Norway, but it is about the Norwegian intelligence effort abroad,” he told The Associated Press.
He stressed that his agency’s actions were legal under Norwegian law since the surveillance was based on suspicions of terrorism-related activity and that potential targets could include Norwegian citizens abroad.
Grandhagen said his intelligence agency had “absolutely no indication” that the NSA was spying on Norwegians.
Not only has Greenwald been shown — again — to be distorting and exaggerating the facts, this also strongly refutes his claim that there’s something uniquely evil about USA intelligence activities. Even Norway has a mass metadata collection program going on. If anything is clear by now from all this, it’s that every country in the world that has the capability to do this kind of surveillance is doing it. And they’re doing it to protect their citizens from terrorism, not for some nefarious evil privacy-destroying agenda.
