Der Spiegel says US bugged EU offices in Washington
Today, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that it got a look at slides detailing the systematic bugging of European Union offices in the US. The news from the paper cited top-secret documents “that Spiegel has in part seen,” which were dated from 2010 and were recently obtained by Edward Snowden. The paper did not publish any of the documents it claims to have reviewed.
Der Spiegel claims that “in addition to installing bugs in the [EU] building in downtown Washington, DC, the EU representation's computer network was also infiltrated. In this way, the Americans were able to access discussions in EU rooms as well as e-mails and internal documents on computers.” The paper also says it saw documents indicating that European members of the United Nations were also subject to the same kind of spying.
Finally, the German paper reported that it saw documents linking the NSA to “an electronic eavesdropping operation” in Brussels. That operation allegedly took place five years ago, when EU security experts noticed some strange calls targeting the maintenance system of the building that houses the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council. At the time, those calls were traced back to NSA offices in the nearby NATO compound.
