US agency reportedly spied on UN’s internal videos

NSA said to have viewed decrypted film from New York headquarters for over a year

By AP 25 August 2013, 5:24 pm

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The UN headquarters in New York (photo credit: CC-BY-SA Aotearoa/Wikimedia Commons)

BERLIN — The German magazine Der Spiegel said the US National Security Agency secretly monitored the UN’s internal video conferencing system by decrypting it last year.

The weekly said Sunday that documents it obtained from American leaker Edward Snowden show the NSA decoded the system at the UN’s headquarters in New York last summer.

Quoting leaked NSA documents, the article said the decryption “dramatically increased the data from video phone conferences and the ability to decode the data traffic.”

In three weeks, Der Spiegel said, the NSA increased the number of decrypted communications at the UN from 12 to 458.

Snowden’s leaks have exposed details of the United States’ global surveillance apparatus, sparking an international debate over the limits of American spying.