The National Security Agency has the United Nations New York headquarters bugged, with targets including the European Union and UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Der Spiegel revealed Sunday, saying the revelations came from documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In 2012, the NSA hacked into the UN's video conference system to obtain access, with one NSA official proclaiming "The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!)," Der Spiegel reports.
The NSA also spied on EU delegates in New York in the year 2012 and obtained information about the EU's IT infrastructure and servers.
Der Spiegel reports that the NSA also runs a monitoring program in over 80 US embassies across the world, without the knowledge of host countries, in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
While these are not the first revelations of US spying on UN officials or EU officials, they are likely to touch off further outrage as the public continues to learn of the staggeringly vast scope of NSA secret surveillance programs.
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