NSA surveillanceDocuments show NSA conducted surveillance of EU member states, embassies (updated)
European politicians issued indignant warnings Sunday to the United States that U.S.-European relations may suffer as a result of revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on European governments and their embassies in Washington, and on European Union (EU) offices. The revelations were contained in documents, dated 2010, which Edward Snowden took from Booz Allen. Observers note that the revelations are not exactly news, since it has always been assumed that the United States spies on the activities of foreign diplomats – even those representing allies — in the United States. It has also been assumed that the United States was conducting surveillance of major countries and international institutions. Moreover, at least seven European Union member states – the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy — have formal agreements with the United States to provide communications metadata to the NSA. “There’s a certain schadenfreude here [in Europe] that we’re important enough to be spied on,” a senior European official said. “This was bound to come out one day. And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of our member states were not doing the same to the Americans.”
More fallout from the Edward Snowden document release // Source: commons.wikimedia.org
European politicians issued angry warnings Sunday to the United States that U.S.-European relations may suffer as a result of revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) spied on European governments and their embassies in Washington, and on European Union (EU) offices. The Spiegel, which broke the story on Saturday, reported that the revelations were contained in documents, dated 2010, which Edward Snowden took from Booz Allen, and which Spiegel reporters have seen.
The German magazine promises more revelations Monday.
The NSA documents state that the agency went beyond electronic eavesdropping, and actually placed bugs at the EU offices in Washington and New York.
The Guardian reports that the NSA directed an operation from the offices of the U.S. delegation to NATO headquarters in Brussels to infiltrate the telephone and e-mail networks at the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital, the venue for EU summits and home of the European council.
Spiegel, without citing sources, reports that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the building, calls traced to NSA offices within the NATO compound in Brussels.
The documents state that metadata on half a billion telephone calls, e-mails, and text messages were harvested from Germany and France every month.
“The Americans were able to access discussions in EU rooms as well as e-mails and internal documents on computers,” the Spiegel reports.
The documents quote NSA officials to describe Germany as a “third-class partner,” claiming that U.S. spies “attack the signals” of Germans as extensively as they monitor states such as China and Saudi Arabia.
The documents state that the NSA typically monitored about twenty million German phone connections and ten million Internet communications a day, as well as two million online connections in France.
The documents note that only Canada, Australia, Britain, and New Zealand are explicitly exempted from U.S. spying activity.
Later Sunday, the Guardian newspaper published additional information, including portions of an internal NSA presentation which details several methods by which U.S. intelligence agencies kept an eye on diplomats inside the United States. The Dropmire program appears to have monitored communications on an encrypted fax machine used by the EU delegation in Washington to communicate with counterparts in Europe.
