On Oct. 23, the White House reacted to reports of the NSA monitoring German chancellor Angela Merkel. They announced President Barack Obama had pledged to Merkel that the U.S. was not examining her communications and would not do so in the future, according to Politico.
The next day, The Guardian reported that the NSA monitored the phone conversations of 35 other world leaders, according to a classified document provided by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
Secret documents from the U.S. intelligence service revealed that the NSA systematically monitored and stored a large share of Germany’s telephone and Internet connection data, according to Spiegel Online.
The surveillance was mostly collecting metadata, which is information generated as you use technology, including the records of several billion telephone calls made in the U.S. each day.
The NSA does listen to the content of some of those phone calls. The NSA also monitors the online presence and phone calls of foreign citizens, emails, instant messages and Facebook posts, as well as contact lists and raw Internet traffic.
Tech companies have denied giving the agency direct access to their servers, but the NSA paid them millions of dollars to cover the cost of complying with its requests. The metadata is stored at the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. near Washington, D.C.
“I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents,” Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said in an interview with the Defense Department’s “Armed With Science” blog. “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on.”
The New York Times described this collection of data as a “new reality,” saying: “The digital age has merely expanded the ability of nations to do to one another what they have done for centuries.” This philosophy of national security has enabled the U.S. to use the “knowledge is power” mantra as a reason to collect information produced by and about its citizens and allies.
According to a CNN article, the NSA uses social media to track social connections between people, including U.S. citizens.
Kalvin Graham, a senior general studies major, said he believes that when leaders begin to distrust one another, other people soon follow.
“The U.S. cannot afford to damage this relationship,” Graham said. “In a time where much of the world, Europe especially, sees the U.S. as finally entering adolescence as a nation, and at a time where they also see us as the cause of many of their financial woes, trust is everything. If we lose backing from leaders of these aged countries, America may find itself steadily slipping from its position of prominence. The pro-active child that aided Europe in two world wars needs to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up: bankrupt and friendless, or safe under the wing of countries that have been through these problems for thousands of years.”
