In Spain, NSA Intercepted 60 Million Phone Calls In A Month In 2012
By Countercurrents.org
28 October, 2013
Countercurrents.org
In a single month in 2012, the US National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted some 60 million phone calls in Spain. This revelation has been made by Spanish daily The World. The daily cited leaked documents from Edward Snowden.
Meanwhile German press is increasingly turning their fire on US president Barack Obama over claims that the NSA has monitored German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone. German media said: president Obama was aware of NSA spying on Merkel since 2010.
Citing US intelligence sources German newspaper Bild am Sonntag said: NSA chief Keith Alexander briefed Obama on the bugging operation against Merkel in 2010.
In Spain, The World said: In December 2012, the NSA collected data on roughly 60 million phone calls.
The revelation is part of the unraveling scandal over vast spying program of the US.
Last week an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel revealed that Washington was directly snooping on least 35 world leaders. The German chancellor Merkel has reportedly been on the spy-list since 2002.
The NSA quickly rejected the reports, claiming that a discussion of such an operation never took place.
President Obama himself personally assured Merkel he didn’t know anything about the spying on her – and that he would have stopped it if he had.
A coalition of more than 20 countries led by Brazil and Germany are now pushing for a UN resolution condemning the US over “indiscriminate” wiretapping and “extra-territorial” surveillance, and calling for “independent oversight” of electronic monitoring.
Obama ‘knew and approved’ spying on Merkel
"Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue," an unnamed high-ranking NSA official told a German newspaper.
Moreover, the paper said, the US president later ordered the NSA to prepare a comprehensive dossier on Merkel.
However, an NSA spokeswoman released a statement on Sunday after the Bild am Sonntag revelations came to light: "Alexander did not discuss with President Obama in 2010 an alleged foreign intelligence operation involving German Chancellor Merkel," adding that "news reports claiming otherwise are not true."
The newspaper report added:
The NSA was listening in to the chancellor’s both work phone provided by her political party, and supposedly her secure phone that she only received this summer. This is evidence that the operation continued until the "immediate past."
NSA spy activity was reportedly conducted on the fourth floor of the US Embassy in central Berlin, just a stone’s throw from the German government’s headquarters.
The NSA's findings, SMS messages and phone calls, were directly reported to the White House in Washington, unlike as usual to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the paper’s source said.
Earlier this week Berlin said that Merkel's communications were "absolutely safe," since she was conducting her important "state political" conversations on encrypted fixed-circuit phone lines. This secure landline phone in her office is allegedly the only one that NSA did not have access to, according to Bild am Sonntag.
Merkel turns out to be not the first German leader to be bugged. According to the report, the NSA also spied on Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, after then-President George W. Bush launched a surveillance program in 2002.
Der Spiegel reported: The monitoring operation was reportedly still in force as recently as a few weeks before Obama's visit to Berlin in June 2013.
Germany is sending its chiefs of foreign and domestic intelligence agencies to Washington for talks with the White House and the NSA to investigate the spying allegations.
Both Germany and France have said they want “a no-spy deal” with the US to be signed by the end of the year.
The row has led to the worst diplomatic crisis between the US and Germany in living memory.
A BBC report said:
Merkel has been genuinely shocked by the revelations. People close to her told she felt personally affronted. When Barack Obama was in Berlin in June, they did seem to get on well. She is not good at hiding her feelings, and the glum scowl she used to reserve for Silvio Berlusconi, for example, was replaced by a beam of warmth. They were tactile - he would put his arm round her back; she would clutch his elbow. Perhaps the sense of betrayal is all the greater because of her background in the East German communist regime where spying was pervasive. She might have expected it from the Stasi but not from her new best friend.
Others might feel betrayed, too. When the original allegations of widespread phone-tapping emerged, some of Merkel's confidantes belittled the problem, saying the criticism of the US had a touch of anti-Americanism and that the surveillance was about terrorism.
If the activities of American government employees were investigated by the German authorities, that would make the whole affair harder to damp down. It would be in the system of justice and pursuit would be relentless.
An NSA source told the paper that Obama had not stopped the operation, and had wanted to know all about Merkel as "he did not trust her".
Such a listening post would be illegal under German law, according to Germany's interior minister.
And the documents seen by the magazine suggest the US was aware of the sensitivities of siting listening stations in US embassies. If their existence were known, they say, there would be "severe damage for the US's relations with a foreign government".
A unit called Special Collection Services, based on the fourth floor of the US embassy in Pariser Platz in Berlin, was responsible for monitoring communications in the German capital's government quarter, including those targeting Merkel it said.
Der Spiegel says the NSA documents show Merkel's number on a list dating from 2002 - three years before she became chancellor.
This might indicate that there was extensive bugging of the phones of prominent people, says the BBC's Stephen Evans in Berlin.
The nature of the monitoring of Merkel's mobile phone is not clear from the files, Der Spiegel says. For example, it is possible that the chancellor's conversations were recorded, or that her contacts were simply assessed.
Merkel phoned President Barack Obama when she first heard of the spying allegations on Wednesday.
The US president apologized to the German chancellor, Der Spiegel reports.
Merkel - an Americophile who was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 - is said to be shocked that Washington may have engaged in the sort of spying she had to endure growing up in Communist East Germany.
A gone aura
"Obama's aura is gone," reads the headline of a front-page commentary in the daily Die Welt.
Obama "did everything to present America's good side to the world" but "hardly any of that remains", the paper's Jacques Schuster argues.
"The damage caused by his secret services is great. It must be repaired," he warns.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung takes a similar line. "Does Obama not realize how much trust he has lost in this country?" a front-page commentary by Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger asks.
"There is no other way to put it, US President Barack Obama looks like a hypocrite in the political landscape," Markus Decker says in the Berliner Zeitung.
"When he took office, he promised more peace and more freedom, but the secret services under his authority have nipped this freedom in the bud," he suggests.
"Obama wanted to know everything about Merkel," Bild's online headline reads.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung believes that, if the Bild report is confirmed, "Obama would come under political pressure not just in foreign relations but also at home".
Meanwhile, Spain has urged the US to give details of any eavesdropping amid reports it monitored 60 million Spanish phone calls in a month.
The US ambassador to Spain was summoned by the EU minister. The ambassador has vowed to clear the "doubts" that had arisen about his country's alleged espionage. The Spanish minister said such practices, if true, were "inappropriate and unacceptable".
Demands are growing in Europe for explanations over US monitoring activities. People in Europe are getting increasingly outraged as the spy scandal is increasingly getting exposed.
Comments are moderated