Europe furious with USA. Calls spying on leaders a breach of trust

Europe is furious with the United States over the extent of its spying activities.

Earlier this week German Chancellor Angela Merkel accused the United States’s National Security Agency (NSA) of tapping her mobile phone.

Barack Obama must have had a pretty awkward phone call with Angela Merkel, underlining the White House’s official statement:

The United States is not monitoring, and will not monitor communications of the Chancellor…

Hang on a minute. *Is* not monitoring? *Will* not monitor? That hardly excludes the possibility that it *did* monitor Angela Merkel’s phone calls does it?

Germany clearly sees it that way, calling any monitoring a “grave breach of trust”.

Yesterday, The Guardian reported that a classified document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders.

And France is up in arms about claims that the NSA intercepted millions of phone calls made by its citizens.

Imagine how you would feel if someone you considered to be a friend, were secretly spying upon your activities, monitoring your conversations. Could you ever trust them again?

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.