Försvarets radio station
The Försvarets radioanstalt ( FRA ; German: "Radio facility for national defense") is a Swedish intelligence service for communications intelligence . It is organized as an independent special unit of the military secret service MUST . MUST makes its capacities available to other services and reports directly to the Swedish Ministry of Defense. The service was founded in 1942.
The core of the FRA is a large listening station with an attached analysis and evaluation department, with the help of which both military and civilian messages are collected by means of radio electronic surveillance. FRA is also responsible for the secure military communication of the Swedish armed forces , as well as for cryptographic tasks such as the (de) encryption of secret messages. The service also works in the field of radar surveillance .
Legal anchoring and competencies
FRA is considered a non-military organization of the Ministry of Defense. According to the company's own information, financing in 2008 was 562 million Swedish kronor (around 57 million euros). The supervisory body is the Military Intelligence Commission.
FRA came under fire after Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's majority of the center-right government passed an enabling law on June 18, 2008 , Lag 2008: 717 om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet , which gave the service extensive powers on domestic espionage grant. The ruling bourgeois government cited the "external threat" from "international terrorism" as the reason for the law.
Since then, FRA has been allowed to monitor the content of all communications between Swedish citizens and foreign countries without a judge's decision and regardless of suspicion . Communication via e-mail, SMS, Internet and fax as well as voice telephony is included. Since January 2009, “Försvarets radioanstalt” has not only recorded the connection data (as with the German data retention system ), but also stores and analyzes the content of the communication. Since some e-mails, for example on the way from Gothenburg to Sundsvall, can circumnavigate half the globe, according to experts, a separation of domestic and international channels is impossible anyway. The law met with widespread popular protest. Criticism of the law came even from “beneficiaries”: from the national police authority ( Rikspolisstyrelsen ), the domestic secret service SÄPO , the Ministry of Justice, the lawyers and journalists' association, newspaper publishers and the telecommunications group TeliaSonera .
Stations
To signIT reconnaissance has FRA several locations in Sweden.
The FRA station on Gotland is well known . The plant was set up towards the end of the Second World War and has been in operation ever since. The island lies in front of the Swedish mainland to the east and covers the area of the eastern Baltic Sea , the Russian Federation, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe (former Warsaw Pact states ) in terms of propagation (see wave vector ). In 1944 the first systems were installed in a house in Ljugarn . In the 1970s, the station moved to an area west of the town and expanded satellite monitoring. Analysts are working there today on the evaluation of communication in Arabic, Persian and Albanian. FRA is a big employer on the island.
Forwarding of data to the NSA
As part of the surveillance and espionage affair in 2013 , it became known that the FRA had forwarded data to the US National Security Agency and the UK Government Communications Headquarters .
Web links
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- ↑ In English. FRA, accessed February 23, 2014 .
- ↑ Sweden. to: secret services.org
- ↑ FRA, brief presentation. FRA, archived from the original on August 11, 2010 ; accessed on February 23, 2014 .
- ↑ Lag (2008: 717) om signalspaning i försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet. on: lagen.nu (Swedish)
- ↑ a b Stockholm allows total surveillance by the secret service. on golem.de June 19, 2008.
- ^ Försvarets Radioanstalt på Gotland (FRA). In: www.tjelvar.se. Retrieved October 23, 2016 .
- ↑ Martin Holland: Surveillance: Swedish Secret Service forwarded data to NSA , Heise online , September 10, 2013