US Officials Say Reports Of NSA Spying In France And Spain Are Blatantly Wrong

U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal in a story published Tuesday that reports of the National Security Agency collecting intelligence abroad on millions of people in France and Spain are inaccurate.

In fact, according to the report, the intelligence-gathering was precipitated by French and Spanish intelligence services - not the NSA. At heart seems to be a misinterpretation of documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that were provided to the French publication Le Monde and the Spain-based El Mundo

From the report:

U.S. intelligence officials studied the document published by Le Monde and have determined that it wasn't assembled by the NSA. Rather, the document appears to be a slide that was assembled based on NSA data received from French intelligence, a U.S. official said.

Based on an analysis of the document, the U.S. concluded that the phone records the French had collected were actually from outside of France, and then were shared with the U.S. The data don't show that the French spied on their own people inside France.

U.S. intelligence officials haven't seen the documents cited by El Mundo but the data appear to come from similar information the NSA obtained from Spanish intelligence agencies documenting their collection efforts abroad, officials said.

The reports last week had caused a fresh round of international uproar against the NSA. The main theme of European summit last week was the anger directed at the agency from these reports, as well as a report that said the NSA had been listening to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conversations since as early as 2002. Germany and France went as far as to demand an unspecific "no-spying agreement" with the U.S.

Much of that anger now appears to have been misdirected, and it adds to the notion that "everybody spies on everybody." The Wall Street Journal's report, however, did not address the Merkel revelations.