American and British intelligence agencies had eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009. The latest disclosures, in a new set of classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden and appearing again in The Guardian, came the night before a meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations was to open in Northern Ireland, where some of the leaders who were intelligence targets four years ago will be in attendance. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/world/europe/new-leak-indicates-us-and-britain-eavesdropped-at-09-world-conferences.html?hp
Government Communications Headquarters, or G.C.H.Q., the British eavesdropping agency that works closely with the N.S.A., monitored the e-mail and phones of other countries’ representatives at two London conferences, in part by setting up a monitored Internet cafe for the participants.
The documents indicated that e-mail interception and key-logging software was installed on the computers in the ersatz Internet cafe, that foreign diplomats’ BlackBerry messages and calls were intercepted, and that 45 analysts tracked who was phoning whom at the meeting.
British and American diplomats and politicians got a real-time feed of intelligence on their counterparts at major summit meetings.
Snowden’s initial release showed the routine collection of data on all phone calls handled by the major American telephone companies and an N.S.A. program called Prism that collects the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet services like Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
The reports have “confirmed longstanding suspicions that N.S.A’s surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew. We desperately need to have a public discussion about the proper limits on N.S.A.”
