‘NSA spied on 60mn phone calls in Spain’

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has spied on 60 million telephone calls in Spain in only one month, a report says.

The Spanish daily El Mundo reported on Sunday that the NSA had gathered the massive data in December 2012.

The report was written by Brazil-based journalist Glenn Greenwald and was based on information provided by American surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The daily published the report a few days after Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy summoned the US ambassador over earlier spying reports.

Rajoy said at the time that he had not yet received any information that the United States spied on his country, but he would receive information in a meeting with the US envoy.

Meanwhile, Germany’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich said on Sunday that its confidence in the United States has been shaken by recent revelations that the NSA spied on private phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A report published on October 26 by German weekly Der Spiegel revealed that Merkel’s mobile phone had been listed by the NSA Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002, and that her mobile phone number was still listed in June 2013.

Furthermore, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls has described recent US spying revelations on France as “shocking.”

His statement came following a report by French daily Le Monde, which showed that the NSA secretly tapped more than 70 million phone conversations in France over a 30-day period earlier this year, and targeted certain high-profile French political and business individuals.

Snowden, who was granted political asylum in Russia on August 1, has been charged in the United States with espionage and theft of government property after leaking documents that revealed the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been secretly gathering information of people in both the US and all around the world.