NIS aquires supercomputer

OSLO/ RIO DE JANEIRO (Dagbladet): The Norwegian military intelligence service collects vast amounts of signal intelligence, known as «sigint». In Afghanistan alone NIS collected 33 million registrations from telecommunication during 30 days around Christmas 2012, according to their own revelations.

Additionally they listen to satellites and radio communication in our own region. The listening post in Vardø, close to the Russian-Norwegian border at the top of Europe, is basically a giant ear eastward. The collection of data has grown out of hand and the Norwegian spies have not been able to use all their collections.

Handeling of this big data is becoming an increasingly important part of the intelligence services' surveillance programs worldwide. The NSA program to monitor email communications and web surfing all over the world, XKeyscore, collected 41 billion records during a 30-day period in 2012. Enormous computing power and storage capacity is needed to process the data and find the needles in the haystacks.

Snowden The Norwegian Inteligence Service (NIS) is also nauseous from the unmanageable amounts of data it is served daily. This is partly the reason why NSA now purchases a supercomputer codenamed Steelwinter. This information comes from a document Edward Snowden took from NSA and has later shared with Dagbladet. The document, marked «top secret» is a summary of how the NSA sees the collaboration with Norway after a meeting between the two services in March 2013.