Why NSA, what big ears you have. WikiLeaks just released a new collection of documents which give a particularly clear picture of the NSA’s spying patterns on its allies. The docs, dubbed “The Euro Intercepts,” detail the systematic spying of the NSA on the economic institutions and officials of France and Germany.
Wikileaks tweeted details regarding specific spying that the NSA had conducted on government officials close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, including her personal assistant. WikiLeaks also published a list of some of the NSA’s most high value targets in the German government and economic sectors, including their partial phone numbers and identifying details.
RELEASE: NSA High Priority Targets For Germanyhttps://t.co/iyc8PQnePb#SelectorList pic.twitter.com/4xvyreCV6o
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 1, 2015
The leaked information also details the level of collaboration between the United States’ NSA and the UK’s GCHQ. New intel discusses the duo’s efforts towards bugging closed-door meetings, including recently French President François Hollande and Merkel’s bailout plans for Greece.
The recent documents uncovering NSA spying on Germany and France have prompted outrage in Europe and created major headaches for the Obama administration.
The timing of today’s release is far from coincidental, earlier today the Merkel administration named a former senior judge as special investigator to examine a list of NSA-provided targets that German Intelligence had been tracking. Merkel’s perceived collaboration with the United States’ intelligence gathering has caused a major hit to her administration’s popularity in recent months.
In a statement regarding today’s documents release, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said:
“Today’s publication further demonstrates that the United States’ economic espionage campaign extends to Germany and to key European institutions and issues such as the EU Central Bank and the crisis in Greece.”
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