This bulk collection, performed under the NSA’s international surveillance authority, taps into the telephony links of major telecommunications providers including some here in the United States.

Jul 08, 2015 · The US National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors, according to WikiLeaks. A No. But, in another way… Yes. The NSA does not have a mandate to listen to US citizen’s phones (citizen to citizen). But this does not apply to calls to/from outside the US. May 07, 2015 · The National Security Agency's practice of collecting data about Americans' telephone calls in bulk goes beyond what Congress intended when it wrote Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, a federal Jan 17, 2014 · GCHQ and NSA eavesdropping on Italian phone calls and internet traffic was reported by the Italian weekly L'Espresso on 24 October. The revelations were sourced to Edward Snowden. It is alleged

Dec 08, 2013 · Americans "are sensitized right now" to cellphone surveillance because of reports about potential abuses by the NSA, said Washoe County Sheriff Michael Haley of Reno.

Phones Being Tapped All Over The World! And, it’s not totally surprising to be reading stuff like this especially when there’s been such media coverage lately about cell phone tapping and ways of spying on mobile phone answer phone messages. It’s been all over the news recently especially in a few high-profile cases in the UK as well as Jul 03, 2014 · The federal board, which sharply criticized the collection of the phone records of Americans by the N.S.A., has come to a starkly different conclusion about a program monitoring foreigners.

The number of different communities the National Security Agency can tap is large. Phone companies maintain about 22,000 central office buildings in the United States, and there are about 25,000 voice switches in them, each remotely addressable to open a phone tap.

Today's revelation follows disclosures by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who highlighted other NSA-backed spy programs, including one called PRISM and another that collects metadata from every phone Telephone tapping (also wire tapping or wiretapping in American English) is the monitoring of telephone and Internet -based conversations by a third party, often by covert means. The wire tap received its name because, historically, the monitoring connection was an actual electrical tap on the telephone line.