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Der Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept


The Intercept, March 29, 2014
Posted: April 7th, 2014
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/29/der-sp...

Secret documents newly disclosed by the German news magazine Der Spiegel ... shed more light on how aggressively the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have targeted Germany for surveillance. A series of classified files from the archive provided to reporters by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden ... reveal that the NSA appears to have included Merkel in a surveillance database alongside more than 100 other foreign leaders. The documents also confirm for the first time that, in March 2013, the NSA obtained a top-secret court order against Germany as part of U.S. government efforts to monitor communications related to the country. [A] document, dated 2009, indicates that Merkel was targeted in a broader NSA surveillance effort. She appears to have been placed in the NSAs so-called Target Knowledge Base (TKB), which Der Spiegel described as the central agency database of individual targets. An internal NSA description states that employees can use it to analyze complete profiles of targeted people. But the NSAs surveillance of Germany has extended far beyond its leader. A separate document from the NSAs Special Source Operations unit ... shows that the Obama administration obtained a top-secret court order specifically permitting it to monitor communications related to Germany. Special Source Operations is the NSA department that manages what the agency describes as its corporate partnerships with major US companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, and Google.

Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.


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