The TV2 news station in Norway has been reporting lately that the American embassy in Oslo has very close links to Norwegian police. Some of the police working on the database records might even be employees of the US embassy.
TV 2 avslørte onsdag at USA i all hemmelighet har bygd opp en etterretningsgruppe for å systematisk overvåke nordmenn. Gruppen, som bærer navnet Surveillance Detection Unit (SDU), ble etablert våren 2000 og plassert i 6 etasje i den såkalte Handelsbygningen som ligger noen hundre meter vest for den amerikanske ambassaden.
In other words…
TV2 revealed Wednesday that the USA has covertly established an intelligence unit to spy on Norwegians. The group, called the Surveillance Detection Unit (SDU), was started in early 2000 on the 6th floor of the so-called Trade building, a few hundred meters west of the American embassy.
The news station says Norwegian authorities admit no knowledge of the operation, which could be a bluff but makes it harder for the US to claim they had diplomatic approval. The timing of the operation is interesting — almost two years before 9/11 but after American embassies were bombed in Kenya and Tanzania. The embassies must have initiated countermeasures as a reaction to those bombings, then adapted it in 2002 and just continued to this day.
An example of “spying” used in the story does not sound clandestine; a former Norwegian police officer stood in the open and filmed a group at a Tamil protest in front of the Royal Palace in 2009. Other men with headsets who looked out of place walked around the demonstration. Members of the protest group at first joked about being monitored. Now they are upset that they may be listed in the U.S. terrorist register.
The uproar so far seems to be less about secret and clandestine behavior by a foreign agency and more about a foreign embassy trying without express authorization to monitor and build a record of local public activity as well as gain access to local law enforcement information.
It started with Norway but Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland now also claim they have found similar concerns with their American embassies.