Snowden's cascade of leaks initially concentrated on how the agency scoops up millions of U.S. phone records and Internet. That is authorized by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows a secret court to authorize U.S. electronic surveillance of people engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the U.S. on behalf of a foreign power.
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Q: Why bug the phone of an ally?
A: Even a close ally like Merkel doesn't share everything with the Americans, but decisions she makes can have a major impact on U.S. foreign, defense and economic policy overseas. Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic party just won an election, and she is in the process of wooing other German political parties to form a coalition government. The party she chooses could pull her political policies in a different direction, in terms of counterterrorism cooperation with the U.S., for instance, or perhaps the new coalition might chill Merkel's support of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
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Q: The Patriot Act, passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, gives the NSA authority to sweep up phone records and internet communication data. Under what authority could the NSA spy on a world leader's cellphone? Merkel's country has no official involvement in terror, but drives European economic policy. Is the U.S. permitted to spy for many reasons?
A: The NSA's particular orders under "Executive Order 12333--United States intelligence activities" include gathering signals intelligence and turning it into something other agencies like the Pentagon and the CIA can use. NSA officers collect that data by any number of means satellite, spy plane flights or drones all outfitted with still, video and/or infrared cameras, or by placing a microphone in the walls of a foreign embassy, or by using computer technology to hack into a foreign computer terminal, or intercept billions of bites of code as it flows on fiber optic and other cables around the world.
The data an NSA analyst handles can be as varied as the way it's collected. A cryptographer might have to crack the code on an encrypted message, or a language specialist might have to translate a rare dialect.
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Q: Why would the U.S. want to spy on economic policy?
A: NSA is also tasked with finding out the kind of policy information that might help U.S. diplomats and trade representatives negotiate future deals, and also what kind of policy changes might be ahead with a major economic heavyweight like Germany.
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Q: Do other countries spy like this on the United States?
A: They do, but most don't have the U.S. technology or financial resources $10.8 billion for fiscal 2013, according to a budget document Snowden leaked. The NSA is rivaled only by Britain's code-breaking Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, an agency the U.S. works with closely, according to the Snowden documents. U.S. ally Israel is one of the top counterintelligence threats, and targets, for American spies. U.S. spies and diplomats who work in Israel expect to have phone calls intercepted, and conversations in public overheard. The CIA station chief in Israel even had his house rifled through by Israeli spies.
