Senior officials from the European Union, foreign aid organizations like Unicef, and European regulators involved in antitrust cases against American corporations were among more than 1,000 targets caught up in a surveillance dragnet engineered by the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ.
The purpose of the surveillance and the information obtained remains unclear, but new documents provided by whistleblower and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden (published in several publications) reveal that the agencies coordinated their efforts, monitoring email and satellite communication as well as intercepting phone conversations and text messages.
In a statement to the New York Times, an NSA spokesperson defended the agency’s actions, stating that the agency’s efforts to study “economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policy makers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security.”