Danish Defence Intelligence Service

Danish Defence Intelligence Service   (Intelligence agency)
Headquarters	Copenhagen
Leader	Danish Defence Intelligence Service/Chief
Interest of	Herbert Pundik
Subpage	•Danish Defence Intelligence Service/Chief

Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE) (English: Danish Defence Intelligence Service) is a military intelligence agency in Denmark.

Whistleblower

Frank Grevil was an employee who blew the whistle on Anders Fogh Rasmussen's lies.

Illegal surveillance and Lying

In August 2020 it was exposed that since 1998, consecutive Danish governments have had an written agreement with the American intelligence service NSA on tapping information from Danish fiber optic cables. This includes telecommunications traffic from Danish citizens, which is illegal without a warrant in Denmark.

This is not just a US initiative, or illegalities in the FE, but a standard policy that all defense ministers have been aware of since the then Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen signed the agreement in 1998, at the dawn of Internet's breakthrough. The agreement was only made public thanks to an anonymous whistleblower.

The Tilsynet med Efterretningstjenesterne (English: Supervision of the Intelligence Services”) commission stated that the NSA's wiretapping of Danish citizens not only happens randomly as part of bulk collection of foreign data, but that the system is built to be able to purposefully carry out this illegal collection. The software tool XKeyscore, exposed by Edward Snowden, is part of the system.

This info that can be used by both the American and the Danish government. The system gave Danish services full access to mass surveillance of its own citizens and contacts between citizens in relation to political activity.

For the US, the access to the fibre optic cables gave the NSA a carte blanche to surveil any Danish citizen and all fibre traffic going through Denmark. As a bonus, the system is a potential open door to conduct business espionage against Danish companies or government activities. The surveillance was also done during the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit.

Bugging the Supervision Committee

In 2020, the Danish Supervision commission (TEF) went public with a comprehensive indictment against the Defense Intelligence Service, for having cooperated with the American NSA in violation of Danish law to obtain information about Danish citizens; for having kept this practice secret from their supervision; and for having spied on Supervision Commission members

Four FE-employees, including boss Lars Findsen and his predecessor Thomas Ahrenkiel, were suspended (with pay) after having kept quiet or lied about these practices to the supervision commission.

When Danish Defence Minister Trine Bramsen put the four FE-employees on paid leave while this was being 'investigated', ex-Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen raged in an interview that Bramsen had to go, for not keeping this case as strictly an internal matter and not lying to the public about it. (Incidentally the interview confirmed what until then had been only an accusation from anonymous sources.)

An internal investigation of the surveillance practice is expected; but it will be done in secret, and the result will be classified. FM Trine Bramsen assured that "It is important for me to emphasise that the fight against the threats against Denmark must not stop while the investigation is carried out".

 

Employee on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End
Thomas Lund-Sørensen	Head of the Center for Cyber Security	May 2012	November 2021

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