slate | Glenn Greenwald's latest Snowden-fueled revelation dropped Monday in Spanish newspaper El Mundo, but the day's most interesting revelation about American spying—at least for those of us not living in Spain—comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal,
which cites unnamed U.S officials to report that the White House
ordered an end to the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
"a number of other world leaders" only after learning of the existence
of the operation this past summer.
That's noteworthy for two reasons: 1) it largely confirms that the
NSA was indeed monitoring its allies abroad as has been suggested by
Snowden's leaks/Greenwald's reporting; and 2) it also suggests that
President Obama may have gone his entire first term without being
briefed on what appears to have been a rather wide-ranging and
aggressive surveillance effort. Here's the Journal:
The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders. Officials said the NSA has so many eavesdropping operations under way that it wouldn't have been practical to brief him on all of them. They added that the president was briefed on and approved of broader intelligence-collection "priorities," but that those below him make decisions about specific intelligence targets.
The senior U.S. official said that the current practice has been for these types of surveillance decisions to be made at the agency level. "These decisions are made at NSA," the official said. "The president doesn't sign off on this stuff." That protocol now is under review, the official added. ...
The administration didn't end all operations involving world leaders following this summer's revelations because some of the programs are producing intelligence of use to the U.S. It could not be learned Sunday how many of the eavesdropping operations were stopped, or who is on the list of leaders still under surveillance.
The report may give Obama at least some diplomatic cover
abroad as he attempts to smooth things over with those European allies
who have been vocal about their displeasure with the apparent
ally-on-ally spying. It will likely be greeted quite differently at
home, however, both by the president's conservative critics who have
sought to paint him as an ineffective executive, and by those
less-partisan critics who have taken specific aim at the NSA and what
they say is its unchecked power. It also raises plenty of other
questions about how much, exactly, the president knew about the NSA's
surveillance efforts before the agency sprung a Snowden-sized leak.
