NSA listed Merkel among leaders subject to surveillance

NSA listed Merkel among leaders subject to surveillance – report

• Special databank said to hold 300 reports on chancellor
• Der Spiegel and Intercept cite document supplied by Snowden

Martin Pengelly in New York

The National Security Agency appears to have included Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, on a list of world leaders subject to surveillance.

The news, the latest extracted from documents supplied to media outlets including the Guardian by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, was reported on Saturday by the German magazine Der Spiegel and The Intercept, a website set up by the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald with the support of the founder of eBay,Pierre Omidyar.

Der Spiegel said the NSA kept more than 300 reports on Merkel in a special databank concerning heads of state, including the leaders of Peru, Somalia, Guatemala, Colombia and Belarus.

The new reports are based on a document from the NSA's Center for Contract Extraction, which carries out automated analysis of collected text data. Der Spiegel said that the document, from 2009, appeared to contain the names of 122 world leaders, listed in alphabetical order from Abdullah Badawi, a former Malaysian prime minister, to Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister at the time. The magazine said the document indicated Merkel was included in a “so-called 'Target Knowledge Database'”.

Reports of American surveillance of the German leader are not new. In October, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA had monitored Merkel's mobile phone for as long as 10 years. The news caused considerablediplomatic embarrassment for President Barack Obama, particularly over the question of whether he had known of such surveillance. The NSA said he had not.

In December, it was reported that, in a conversation with Obama, Merkel compared the NSA to the Stasi, the security and surveillance organisation of communist East Germany.

Earlier this month, German lawmakers agreed to launch an inquiry into surveillance by the NSA and other foreign intelligence services. German federal prosecutors may also open an investigation.

Saturday's reports also said the British spy agency, GCHQ, infiltrated servers run by German internet companies and eavesdropped on staff communications, and that in March 2013 the NSA obtained a court order to spy on Germany. GCHQ and NSA surveillance of German targets has also been reported before.

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/29/nsa-merkel-leaders-surveillance-documents-snowden