Latest NSA abuse allegation: Spying on the United Nations

The new revelation comes as the NSA also cops to acknowledging that some of its analysts have snooped on e-mails of ex-lovers.

Charles Cooper


Edward Snowden

By now, this shouldn't be a surprise. The National Security Agency spied on the internal videoconferencing system used by United Nations officials by decrypting it last year, according to German magazine Der Spiegel.

The disclosure came from documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has provided a trove of materials to Britain's The Guardian newspaper about heretofore secret details of the NSA's surveillance program. The Spiegel story says that the encryption cracking took place in the summer of 2012. In our spy-versus-spy world, one other choice nugget came to public notice: The documents detail that the NSA discovered that the Chinese were also attempting to break into UN communications at the same time.

Meanwhile, a couple of days earlier came a separate disclosure that NSA analysts have occasionally read the e-mails of former lovers.

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