Max Fisher

On NSA Spying

In a 2014 article for Vox about the NSA scandal and the spying on German Officials, Fisher wrote: "The US has long denied that spy agencies snooped on Merkel's cell phone. When the story first broke in October 2013, President Obama personally called Merkel to tell her it wasn't true. It was widely assumed that Obama was lying; it now appears, based on Germany's own investigation, that he may have been telling the truth."

"The narrative arc of Merkel's cell phone tap, from widely accepted truth to possibly debunked misapprehension, speaks to a larger problem with the recent NSA leaks. The problem was always that the documents were vague and complicated and left a lot of room for interpretation. The documents were complicated and interpreting them was not always easy. The US government, unsurprisingly, refused to help. And Snowden, for all his idealism and ethics, has been an imperfect interpreter of those documents himself, as have his allies. That has meant that sometimes "revelations" about NSA programs like the tap on Merkel's phone turn out to be wrong, or turn out to be different from how they were first described."[[1]]

However, reports surfaced in July 2015, citing documents leaked by WikiLeaks, which showed that the U.S. spied on Angela Merkel's ministers. In addition, the U.S. has also appeared to confirm that Merkel's cell phone was in fact spied on by saying the cell phone was "no longer" a target. [[2]]