The National Security Agency (NSA) is the main US agency for global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation, and analysis of foreign intelligence data. The NSA's parent organization is the US Department of Defense. Allegedly, based on the information released by former contractor Edward Snowden, the agency bugs electronic systems to protect the U.S. government communications and information systems and collects and stores phone records of millions of American and international citizens. Snowden's data suggested that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, were targets of NSA surveillance.
A federal court has ruled that the US intelligence surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was unlawful and possibly unconstitutional. A US federal appeals court in 2019 ruled that the controversial National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was illegal. The ruling stopped short of calling the program unconstitutional. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said that the program, under which the NSA collected and analyzed bulk data provided by telecommunications companies, was in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and could have been unconstitutional.
Edward Snowden
Edward Snowden, the US whistleblower who is living in exile after leaking NSA files in 2013, says he and his wife are applying for Russian citizenship. The former US security contractor said that he and his wife wanted to apply for Russian citizenship without giving up their US citizenship. He said it was to avoid becoming potentially separated from their son in the future if borders were to be closed as they have been during the corona virus pandemic. "After years of separation from our parents, my wife and I have no desire to be separated from our son. That's why, in this era of pandemic and closed borders, we're applying for dual US-Russian citizenship," he said in a tweet.
Former President Obama promised that NSA surveillance activities were aimed exclusively at preventing terrorist attacks. But secret documents from the intelligence agency show that the Americans spy on Europe, the UN, and other countries. For the National Security Agency (NSA), America's powerful intelligence organization, the move was, above all, a technical challenge. A new office means freshly painted walls, untouched wiring, and newly installed computer networks -- in other words, loads of work for the agents. While the Europeans were still getting used to their glittering new offices, NSA staff had already acquired the building's floor plans. The drawings completed by a New York real estate company show precisely to scale how the offices are laid out. Intelligence agents made enlarged copies of the areas where the data servers are located. At the NSA, the European mission near the East River was referred to by the codename "Apalachee".
Bugging the EU
The espionage attack on the EU is not only a surprise for most European diplomats, who until now assumed that they maintained friendly ties to the US government. It is also remarkable because the NSA has rolled out the full repertoire of intelligence-gathering tools -- and has apparently been taking this approach for many years now. According to an operational overview from September 2010 that is rated "secret," not only have the Americans infiltrated the EU mission to the UN in New York, but also the EU embassy in Washington, giving the building in the heart of the American capital the code name "Magothy."
According to this secret document, the NSA has targeted the European missions in three ways: The embassies in Washington and New York are bugged, at the embassy in New York the hard disks have also been copied, in Washington the agents have also tapped into the internal computer cable network. The embassies are linked via a so-called virtual private network (VPN).
"In case there was a loss of access to one site, could immediately regain it by riding the VPN to the other side and punching a whole (sic!) out," the NSA technicians said during an internal presentation. "We have done this several times when we got locked out of Magothy."
How America Spies on Europe
“Systematic wiretapping of close allies is unacceptable,” came a recent comment from Danish Defense Minister Trine Bramsen. And yet, it appears this is exactly what Denmark has been doing. Bramsen was responding to reporting that revealed the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, or FE) had cooperated with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to enable spying on several European partners and close allies. Considering the major reputational costs that would surely have been evident from the outset, why did Denmark agree to this partnership? Why would it allow the NSA to use Danish data cables to spy on senior officials in France, Germany, Norway and Sweden, including German chancellor Angela Merkel?
Revelations about the extent of the American National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) global communications surveillance have raised considerable media and political attention. The fact that the NSA not only bugs the phones of drug kingpins and reads the e-mails of al-Qaeda members, but also targets so-called “friendly” states, such as Germany, Brazil, and France, has had a significant impact on the current discussion. Der Spiegel’s allegations that even the mobile of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel was not safe from American spying efforts were widely seen as scandalous. As Robert Roßmann in the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “(a) greater affront by a friendly state is hardly conceivable”. [6]
Embarrassing leaks that show the US National Security Agency (NSA) spied on high-ranking European Union leaders for years have opened up old wounds of distrust between close military and diplomatic allies. What has worried EU politicians, even more, is that Denmark's military intelligence service - the FE - cooperated with the NSA in a sophisticated eavesdropping scheme that targeted German Chancellor Angela Merkel among others. The revelations came in a pan-European media investigation led by Danish public broadcaster, Danmarks Radio, which said the NSA used Denmark's internet cables to retrieve calls and text messages of high-ranking officials from Germany, Sweden, Norway, and France between 2012 and 2014.
European leaders might be angry that Denmark helped the US to spy on them. They shouldn’t be surprised. Denmark’s European allies are “shocked, shocked!” to discover that the little Nordic country had helped the United States spy on Germany, France, and other European allies between 2012 and 2014. Quelle horreur! France’s Europe minister, Clément Beaune, declared the revelations that Copenhagen allowed the U.S. National Security Agency to use Danish eavesdropping systems to listen in on conversations by top European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and German President Franz-Walter Steinmeier, as “extremely serious.”
Steinbrück spoke to the German members of the research team upon finding out about the spying operations against him. "Politically, I consider this a scandal," he said. While he accepted that western states require functioning intelligence services, the fact that Danish authorities had been spying on their partners showed "that they are rather doing things on their own." Neither Merkel nor Steinmeier had "any knowledge" of the spying operations carried out by leading Danish government officials. A spokesperson said that the chancellor had been informed of the revelations.
Leaders in Europe have reacted to the revelations that Danish authorities cooperated with the NSA's spying operations - which included tapping Angela Merkel's mobile phone. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron said in July 2021, that they expected an explanation regarding the revelations that the Danish secret service had aided the US in spying on European leaders. An investigation carried out by a group of European news outlets and broadcasters discovered that Danish intelligence had helped the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on top politicians in Germany, France, and other countries between 2012 and 2014 when Joe Biden was serving as vice president. Macron condemned the actions by Danish authorities following a meeting with Merkel, with the German chancellor agreeing that answers from Washington and Copenhagen were required.
Cooperation between the NSA and German intelligence
Since the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, when thousands of people were killed, the war on terrorism has been moved to a new dimension around the world. Laws have been tightened, and Western intelligence services have intensified their cooperation. This also applies to cooperation between the US National Security Agency and German intelligence, and it seems that this cooperation did not take into account many of the applicable laws. This can be inferred from documents published by Edward Snowden in 2013.
On May 4, 2015, the” Frontal 21 Program” announced that it had seen a secret document of the German government confirmed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on European and German targets at least until August 2013. According to the data, on 26th August 2013, the German intelligence agency (BND) found that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on recent email addresses of European politicians, ministries of European Union member states, EU institutions, and representative headquarters of German companies. The document stated that US espionage practices conflicted with German interests.
German media reports revealed that the US National Security Agency tried to spy on government facilities in Austria by cooperating with the German foreign intelligence service. The German newspaper "Bild am Sonntag" reported that German intelligence, worked for the US Agency interest, searched by Internet words such as "gov" and "Diplo" and others related to government offices, through the monitoring station of the German intelligence in, Bavaria.
German media reports had revealed earlier that German intelligence had helped the US National Security Agency in spying on the French government and the European Commission in Brussels for years. The same spying station was used to spy on high-ranking officials of the French Foreign Ministry and Presidential palace, as well as the European Commission.
Conclusion
It is well known that espionage is a "legitimate right" that many states have the right to gather information for national security purposes, including what is focused on knowing external threats to national security and perhaps internal threats within the national internal intelligence missions. But spying between allies is undoubtedly inconsistent with the covenants and instruments signed between allies or friendly countries.
Talking about Europe or specifically the European Union, there is no doubt that there is no espionage in the fields of defense and security, as much as it focuses on “industry” and scientific Invention, and perhaps Europe has witnessed hot intelligence activities to obtain what is going in laboratories.
This means that espionage operations will continue and cannot be stopped, but if we talk about the United States spying on European countries, in particular, this is due to the weakness of Europe's cyber capabilities, and space espionage, as it stands helpless in front of NSA, and this is what makes Europe under the control of "NSA" in particular. It seems that Europe cannot get out of the US umbrella "NSA" for decades. What Europe needs is to upgrade its national security, in the field of non-traditional strategic security, including Internet engines, space espionage, and cybersecurity.
