Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Försvarets Radioanstalt

Type	Government agency
Founded	1942
Headquarters	Stockholm
Products	Signals intelligence

The Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment, or Försvarets radioanstalt (FRA) is a Swedish signals intelligence agency working closely together with the S1 regiment. It was founded during the World War II with the cryptological activities of Arne Beurling. The main headquarters are located on Lovön, 15 km west from the center of Stockholm. FRA was assigned a budget of 514 million krona in 2007 and has around 700 employees.

Top500 credits FRA for owning the world's 5th fastest supercomputer in their november 2007-list.^[1]^[2] According to Jonas Strömbäck, chief of the general directors staff, the computer is being used for "cryptography and information security."^[3]^[4] Christian Engström, vice president of the Swedish Pirate Party ^[5] has theorized that their supercomputer will be used to break the GSM crypto A5/1 and refers to a official document from FRA^[6]. In the document FRA refers to breakthroughs in cryptanalysis the last year and continues with that FRA needs more processing power in order to exploit these breakthroughs. According to Christian, this fits very well in on the description of the weaknesses recently discovered in A5/1.

The purpose of FRA is to:^[7]

intercept and analyze signals
Identify external threats
Secure government and government owned companies information systems (information security)
Assist the Swedish army with information warfare^[8]^[9]
Analyze cryptosystems for usage by the Swedish government and army

1 Proposition 2006/07:63
2 Illegal wiretaping
3 External links
4 References

[edit] Proposition 2006/07:63

The Swedish government is preparing a referendum^[10] that, if applied, will give the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment the right to monitor traffic at all internet exchange points for traffic which enters or leaves Sweden in the hunt for terrorists. Telephone companies in Finland have expressed their worry about the referendum, as it will make it illegal for them to cable international telephone conversations via the Swedish networks.^[11] Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel, wrote about this:

“

By introducing these new measures, the Swedish government is following the examples set by governments ranging from China and Saudi Arabia to the US government’s widely criticised eavesdropping programme. Do Swedish citizens really want their country to have the most aggressive government surveillance laws in Europe?^[12]

”

Finnish Sonera is currently (as of 5th june 2008) moving their e-mail servers out of Sweden to avoid letting FRA wiretap the finnish population. Juha-Pekka Weckström, Senior Vice President of TeliaSonera Broadband Services Finland said "We decided to move Sonera's e-mail services back to Finland in order to protect the privacy of our Finnish customers. After the migration, e-mails sent from one Finn to another will not cross Finland's borders at any stage."^[13]

[edit] Illegal wiretaping

Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish pirate party recorded an mp3-conversation^[14] with Anders Wik in 2007. Anders Wik, at that time employed at FRA as chief of the general directors staff and unknowing that Rick was recording the conversation, said that the organisation was already conducting illegal wiretapping on phone conversations. Anders Wik also said that proposition 2006/07:63 only had the purpose of making their ongoing wiretapping of phones legal. The mp3-recording was made public at a demonstration in Stockholm the 31th of May, 2007. Computer Sweden^[15] was the only Swedish newspaper to write about Rick revealing his conversation with Anders Wik. Anders Wik says in the article that he has no disbeliefs in that Ricks recording is authentic. Max Andersson, representing the Green Party has because of Computer Swedens article demanded an investigation in the matters^[16].