US security services tracked 60.5 million telephone calls in Spain in a single month, according to a leaked document published in a Spanish newspaper yesterday, as European outrage over US snooping deepened.
The US National Security Agency (NSA) tracked the origin and destination of the calls and their duration, US blogger Glenn Greenwald said in a story in El Mundo, which published a classified graph of 30 days of call tracing.
Greenwald, who jointly authored the article, said he had access to the previously secret documents, which were obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Photo: Reuters
The news broke hours before Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials were to meet US Ambassador to Spain James Costos, who has been summoned to provide information about alleged US spying on Spanish telecommunications.
The reported spying in Spain adds to a growing scandal over US eavesdropping on ordinary citizens and world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose calls may have been intercepted as early as 2002, according to the German press.
The graph published in El Mundo showed the daily volume of calls traced in the 30 days to Jan. 8. Initials at the top of the page included DNR (dialed number recognition), the article said.
The NSA tracked the origin, destination and duration of phone calls — a criminal offence in Spain without the proper legal authority — but not their content, the paper said.
On a single day, Dec. 11, the NSA tracked more than 3.5 million calls on Spanish soil, the peak in the 30-day period covered by the graph.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy last week said he had no evidence that Spain had been spied on, but was calling in Costos to seek information.
At a summit last week, the 28 EU leaders approved a statement which said they valued the relationship with the US, but it had to be based on trust and confidence, especially in intelligence matters.
France and Germany are to lead efforts to reach a new understanding with Washington by the end of this year.
Rajoy said that for the moment, Spain would not join Berlin and Paris in this effort and reiterated that intelligence issues were the responsibility of national governments, not the EU.
Meanwhile, the US on Sunday denied that US President Barack Obama had been informed years ago that US spy agencies were monitoring Merkel’s phone calls.
German media reported that eavesdropping on Merkel’s phone may have started when she was Germany’s main opposition leader and three years before she became chancellor.
The NSA stopped spying on Merkel after the White House learned of the snooping in an internal mid-year review, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, the first public acknowledgement that there was US eavesdropping.
The review, which Obama ordered in August last year, showed that the NSA had tapped the phones of about 35 world leaders. The White House ended programs tracking several of the leaders including Merkel, the Journal said.
‘EYE FOR AN EYE’: Two of the men were shot by a male relative of the victims, whose families turned down the opportunity to offer them amnesty, the Supreme Court said Four men were yesterday publicly executed in Afghanistan, the Supreme Court said, the highest number of executions to be carried out in one day since the Taliban’s return to power. The executions in three separate provinces brought to 10 the number of men publicly put to death since 2021, according to an Agence France-Presse tally. Public executions were common during the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most of them carried out publicly in sports stadiums. Two men were shot around six or seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the center
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
The US will help bolster the Philippines’ arsenal and step up joint military exercises, Manila’s defense chief said, as tensions between Washington and China escalate. The longtime US ally is expecting a sustained US$500 million in annual defense funding from Washington through 2029 to boost its military capabilities and deter China’s “aggression” in the region, Philippine Secretary of Defense Gilberto Teodoro said in an interview in Manila on Thursday. “It is a no-brainer for anybody, because of the aggressive behavior of China,” Teodoro said on close military ties with the US under President Donald Trump. “The efforts for deterrence, for joint resilience
RSS