NSA Spying on Angela Merkel Since 2002

Look, friends spy on friends, although even Merkel's cell phone was bugged.

She's obviously not pleased, and just reelected to a third term, she's got some political capital, and she aims to spend some of that against President Dronekiller.

At the New York Times, "Amid New Storm in U.S.-Europe Relationship, a Call for Talks on Spying":

BERLIN — While President Obama has tried to soften the blow, this week’s disclosures about the extent of America’s spying on its European allies have added to a series of issues that have sharply eroded confidence in the United States’ leadership at a particularly difficult moment.

The sharp words from Germany, France and others this week are part of a broader set of frustrations over issues like the Syrian civil war, the danger posed to the global economy by Washington’s fiscal fights and the broader perception that President Obama himself — for all his promises to rebuild relations with allies after the presidency of George W. Bush — is an unreliable partner.

This American administration is “misreading and miscalculating the effects” of its deeds in a Europe that is less ready than it once was to heed the United States, said Annette Heuser, executive director of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a research organization in Washington.

Early on Friday, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France emerged from a meeting of European leaders to call for talks with the United States on new rules for their intelligence relationship. A statement from the European leaders said a “lack of trust” could undermine trans-Atlantic intelligence cooperation.

Earlier in the week the European Parliament had acted to suspend an agreement with the United States that allows it to track the finances of terrorist groups, citing suspicions that the United States authorities were tapping European citizens’ personal financial data.

The disclosures contained in the documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have crystallized a growing sense in Europe that post-Sept. 11 America has lost some of the values of privacy and accountability that have been the source of the world’s admiration for its version of democracy.

So fierce was the anger in Berlin over suspicions that American intelligence had tapped into Ms. Merkel’s cellphone that Elmar Brok of Germany, the chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a pillar of trans-Atlantic exchanges since 1984, spoke Friday of America’s security establishment as a creepy “state within a state.”

Since Sept. 11, 2001, he said, “the balance between freedom and security has been lost.”

And at the Verge, "US has been monitoring German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone since 2002, report says."

And at London's Daily Mail, "German officials set to travel to the U.S. 'shortly' to discuss spying allegations and whether Angela Merkel's phone was monitored by the NSA," and "U.S. monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone since 2002."

Stop Watching Us

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation, FWIW.

Bruce Schneier on NSA and Snowden Documents

See, "NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe" (via Instapundit).

More at Schneier blog, "Senator Feinstein Admits the NSA Taps the Internet Backbone."

(I'm sure readers will recall my personal position on all of this. I think Snowden's a traitor, although that doesn't mean I'm unconcerned with the never ending growth of the Orwellian state. Security vs. liberty. There's a right balance. Getting there requires citizen participation, not treason, to beat back government secrecy.)

N.S.A. Examines Social Networks of U.S. Citizens

Big Brother keeps getting bigger.

At NYT, "N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens":

WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a “contact chain” tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest.

The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.’s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency’s operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation’s intelligence court or any public debate. As far back as 2006, a Justice Department memo warned of the potential for the “misuse” of such information without adequate safeguards.

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