WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama recently ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to curtail eavesdropping on the United Nations headquarters in New York as part of a review of US electronic surveillance, according to a US official familiar with the decision.
Obama’s order is the latest known move by the White House to limit the NSA’s vast intelligence collection, in the wake of protests by allies, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, over US spying on foreign heads of state.
Obama is also considering whether to ban US spy agencies from eavesdropping on allied leaders, a senior official said yesterday, following outrage in Europe over NSA snooping. The official said the step was under consideration, but that no policy decisions had yet been finalised, as Obama awaits results of several already announced reviews into US surveillance practices.
The full extent of US eavesdropping on the United Nations is not publicly known, nor is it clear whether the US has stopped all monitoring of diplomats assigned to the UN in New York or elsewhere around the world.
“The United States is not conducting electronic surveillance targeting the United Nations headquarters in New York,” said a senior Obama administration official. Such programmes are highly classified, although some details have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
According to the first official, the president’s aides have said in briefings that the White House no longer wanted to conduct certain monitoring of UN targets. The official said that the decision was made within the last few weeks. The NSA declined to comment. Spokesmen for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Historically, the United Nations and New York-based diplomatic missions of member states have been targets for aggressive spying by the United States, its allies and adversaries. FBI counter-intelligence squads have long mounted operations to try to identify spies posing as UN diplomats.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel, citing documents leaked by Snowden, reported in August that the NSA had succeeded in the summer of 2012 in getting into the UN video conferencing system and breaking its encryption. It added that within three weeks the number of decoded communications had risen to 458 from 12.
Reuters/AFP
