14 DAY TRIAL // Several months ago, the Edward Snowden files revealed that the NSA and the US government were busy spying on Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. According to the media reports at the time, an American official was more than willing to share his phonebook containing the numbers of foreign leaders, and encouraged others to do the same.
Since that was one single instance, it was safe to say that there were a lot of names on the NSA’s target list, but there were few details regarding the extent that the intelligence agency’s spying went when it came to state leaders.
Well, according to a newly released document published by German newspaper Der Spiegel and The Intercept, in 2009 alone the NSA may have snooped on as many as 122 foreign leaders.
The list, in fact, starts off alphabetically with Abdullah Badawi, the Malaysian Prime Minister and continues with Abdullahi Yusuf, Somali president. The Leaders of Peru, Belarus, Guatemala, Colombia and Syria are on the list as well, alongside Angela Merkel and Yuliya Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian Prime Minister.
The list is lengthy, but the document only shows 11 entries, as the entries between number 11 and 121 are replaced by a dotted line. The file reveals some additional information, however, namely the number of “cites” for each individual.
More than 300 “cites” are marked for Merkel, while Alvaro Uribe (Colombia) got 700 and Bashar al-Asad (Syria) got 800.
All these numbers were placed in the “Target Knowledge Base,” which NSA employees can use to analyze profiles of targeted people.
One search system developed by the agency and called “Nymrod” is the one that provided the information listed above regarding the glimpse into NSA’s top-target list of foreign leaders.
The agency uses Nymrod to find information “relating to targets that would otherwise be tough to track down.” The search system goes through secret reports based on intercepted communications collected from computer systems, also known as “cites.”
The fact that the American intelligence agency has a lengthy list of foreign leaders that it spies on is not particularly surprising, especially given all the information that has transpired over the past months since the entire scandal began.
However, such actions are surely not going to be well-received by the world’s political leaders and the revelations will certainly cause some more diplomatic problems for the United States, as it did on each occasion that a new president or prime minister was named by media reports among NSA’s targets.
