Former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden responded, in an interview with the German weekly Der Spiegel, to criticisms related to the embarrassing revelation via Mark Snowden of NSA spying on the phone calls of Prime Minister Angela Merkel. Additional documents leaked by Snowden have become the basis for allegations that the NSA and British signals intelligence spy on German tech companies. 

More details have emerged about the U.S. and British spy agencies’ efforts to surveil targets in Germany — including chancellor Angela Merkel. According to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the British spy agency GCHQ conducted surveillance by tapping the servers of three German companies offering super-high-speed wireless Internet service to remote areas. The revelations appeared in German magazine Spiegel yesterday. The three companies — Stellar, Cetel, and IABG — “provide communications links to places like oil drilling platforms, diamond mines, refugee camps and foreign outposts of multinational corporations and international organizations,” and are connected on the back end to high-bandwidth European Internet backbones.