In a sharp rebuke to President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel compared the NSA spying activities to the East German “Stasi.”
The United States spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone line. (File photo: AFP)
NSA and intelligence officials say the White House signed off on surveillance targeting friendly world leaders.
Press TV reported:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has compared the spying activities of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) to those of the secret police of former Communist East Germany, known as Stasi.
“This is like the Stasi; the NSA clearly could not be trusted with private information, because they let [NSA whistleblower Edward] Snowden clean them out”” Merkel told US President Barack Obama, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, without specifying when the conversation between the two leaders took place.
The report said Merkel was particularly livid over the US tapping her mobile phone calls, following revelations made by Snowden about global spying activities by the NSA.
In October, Edward Snowden leaked top secret US government spying programs, under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) eavesdrop on millions of American and European phone records and internet data from major internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.