WikiLeaks and the NSA’s Hobby of Spying On Allies

The intercepted communication was shared with the “Five Eyes” alliance—UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

WikiLeaks have released a new collection of documents, which give a particularly clear picture of the NSA’s spying patterns on its allies. The documents 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.
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 the release is far from coincidental, earlier 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 the recent 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.”

The whistle-blowing website published a National Security Agency list of 29 Brazilian government phone numbers that the American spy group monitored. Publication of the list sheds new light on the spying scandal that first erupted in 2013 and damaged relations between America and Brazil, prompting Rousseff to cancel a state visit to Washington in an embarrassment for President Barack Obama. However Rousseff did finally visit the United States recently, but the new spying revelations did not emerge until just after her return.

According to a story on The Intercept website, which first reported the WikiLeaks data, the eavesdropping apparently began in early 2011 or even earlier. The Intercept said there was no indication the surveillance had stopped. The NSA did not respond to questions from the website.
In a statement, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange said the latest disclosures could impact business confidence in Brazil.

The latest disclosures come on the heels of new WikiLeaks releases that appeared to show the United States listened in on German and French government officials.
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