Datagate: Olmert and Almunia Also Bugged.EU: “We will be raising the issue with the US”

The list of personalities and international institutions the American security agency, the NSA, has spied on is getting longer: New revelations from Edward Snowden’s documents, which The New York Times cites, include former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Vice-president of the European Commission Joaquin Almunia, and U.N. missions in Geneva, including the FAO and UNICEF.

However, the British agency, GCHQ, is also involved in the espionage operations. The European Commission’s reaction came through spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde, who spoke of the unacceptable disclosures, which “deserve the strongest condemnation,” and announced, “We will be raising the issue with the authorities of the United States and Great Britain.” Also involved in the issue is U.S. President Barack Obama, “The way in which these disclosures happened has been damaging to the United States and damaging to our intelligence capabilities.”

The many other targets of the surveillance activities of the U.S. and Great Britain — dating between 2008 and 2011 — also include former Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, the Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the companies Total and Thales, nongovernmental organization Medecins du Monde, a French ambassador, and the German embassy in Rwanda. The United Nations Development Program and World Health Organization were also under surveillance. A 2009 document informed us of the reading of the text messages of Mohammed Ibn Chambas, current joint special representative for the U.N. in Darfur and head of the African Union, and former president of the Economic Community of West African Slaves.

More details on the interceptions came from the British newspaper, The Guardian. The GCHQ, in particular, conducted the operation primarily from a listening base not far from Bude, a Cornwall coastal town: It is an organization, writes The Guardian, that receives consistent NSA funding for joint, trans-Atlantic, surveillance operations. Moreover, always according to the British newspaper, the intelligence agencies, especially the British ones, monitored some German government buildings, in particular, aiming to monitor communications between Germany, Georgia and Turkey. One detail that is likely to cause considerable embarrassment between London and Berlin is that the Germans were already irritated by espionage activities on Angela Merkel’s cell phone.

Precisely to limit the intrusion of the intelligence agencies, the U.N. General Assembly by has adopted by consensus a resolution Germany and Brazil have promoted in support of the right to privacy, inviting all states to stop those actions that violate one of the “fundamental principles of a democratic society.”