Revelations that the US has been monitoring mobile phones, including that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have caused a worldwide furore. The claims are threatening diplomatic ties between the US and other countries, with Germany summoning US ambassador John Emerson yesterday. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff cancelled a state visit to the US and slammed Washington at the United Nations General Assembly following allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) was spying on Brazilian government and commercial interests. Mexico’s new President Enrique Pena Nieto is making hay from claims that the NSA hacked his personal email. But Mr Vicente Fox, one of Mr Nieto’s predecessors, is playing the grizzled elder statesman. “It’s nothing new that there’s espionage in every government in the world, including Mexico,” he said. “I don’t understand the scandal.” Mrs Merkel has demanded a “complete explanation” of the claims, which are threatening to overshadow an EU summit. She discussed the issue with President Barack Obama on Wednesday who assured her the US was not monitoring her calls and would not do so in future. This left open the question whether calls had been listened to in the past. French President Francois Hollande has already called for the matter to be put on the summit agenda following reports that millions of French calls had been monitored. State-monitoring of calls has a particular resonance in Germany — Mrs Merkel herself grew up in East Germany, where phone- tapping was pervasive. Her spokesman said the German leader “views such practices... as completely unacceptable” and had demanded a “complete and comprehensive explanation”. US Secretary of State John Kerry said that activities to protect national security were “not unusual” in international relations. In July, German media carried comments by Edward Snowden suggesting the NSA worked closely with Germany and other Western states on a “no questions asked” basis, monitoring German internet traffic, emails and phone calls. Mr Snowden, a former contractor for the CIA, left the US in late May after leaking to the media details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by American intelligence. Mr Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia, faces espionage charges over his actions. As the scandal widens, BBC News looks at the leaks which brought the US spying activities to light. The scandal broke in early June when the Guardian newspaper reported that the US NSA was collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. The paper published the secret court order directing telecommunications company Verizon to hand over all its telephone data to the NSA on an “ongoing daily basis”. That report was followed by revelations in both the Washington Post and Guardian that the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to track online communication in a surveillance propgramme known as Prism. Britain’s electronic eavesdropping agency GCHQ was also accused of gathering information on the online companies via Prism. Shortly afterwards the Guardian revealed that was behind the leaks about the US and UK surveillance programmes. He has been charged in the US with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence. The GCHQ scandal widened on 21 June when the Guardian reported that the UK spy agency was tapping fibre-optic cables that carry global communications and sharing vast amounts of data with the NSA, its US counterpart. The paper revealed it had obtained documents from Snowden showing that the GCHQ operation, codenamed Tempora, had been running for 18 months. GCHQ was able to boast a larger collection of data than the US, tapping in to 200 fibre-optic cables to give it the ability to monitor up to 600 million communications every day, according to the report. The information from internet and phone use was allegedly stored for up to 30 days to be sifted and analysed. Although the GCHQ did not break the law, the Guardian suggested that the existing legislation was being very broadly applied to allow such a large volume of data to be collected. After fleeing to Hong Kong, Snowden told the South China Morning Post that the NSA had led more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, including many in Hong Kong and mainland China. He said targets in Hong Kong included the Chinese University, public officials and businesses. “We hack network backbones - like huge internet routers, basically - that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” Mr Snowden was quoted as saying. Claims emerged on 29 June that the NSA had also spied on European Union offices in the US and Europe, according to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. The magazine said it had seen leaked NSA documents showing that the US had spied on EU internal computer networks in Washington and at the 27-member bloc’s UN office in New York. The paper added that it had been shown the “top secret” files by Snowden. One document dated September 2010 explicitly named the EU representation at the UN as a “location target”, Der Spiegel wrote. The files allegedly suggested that the NSA had also conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels, where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council were located. It is not known what information US spies might have obtained. But observers say details of European positions on trade and military matters could be useful to those involved in US-EU negotiations. A total of 38 embassies and missions have been the “targets” of US spying operations, according to a secret file leaked to the Guardian. Countries targeted included France, Italy and Greece, as well as America’s non-European allies such as Japan, South Korea and India, the paper reported on 1 July. EU embassies and missions in New York and Washington were also said to be under surveillance. The file allegedly detailed “an extraordinary range” of spying methods used to intercept messages, including bugs, specialised antennae and wire taps. The Guardian report also mentioned codenames of alleged operations against the French and Greek missions to the UN, as well as the Italian embassy in Washington. US Secretary of State John Kerry said that activities to protect national security were “not unusual” in international relations. US allies in Latin America were angered by revelations in Brazil’s O Globo newspaper on 10 July that the NSA ran a continent-wide surveillance programme. .The paper cited leaked documents showing that, at least until 2002, the NSA ran the operation from a base in Brasilia, seizing web traffic and details of phone calls from around the region.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 06:52:53 +0000