India was also one of the country, which was being spied by NSA and stands at fifth place, with billions of pieces of information plucked from its telephone and internet networks just in 30 days, The Hindu reported.
It was already revealed NSA had its eyes on emerging nations forming BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
Top-secret documents provided by Edward Snowden to The Hindu reflect that in the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place.
The Hindu writes:
| According to top-secret documents, NSA carried out intelligence gathering activities in India using at least two major programs:the first one is Boundless Informant, a data-mining system which keeps track of how many calls and emails are collected by the security agency; and the second one is PRISM, a program which intercepts and collects actual content from the networks. |
Newspaper also revealed that almost 13.5 Billion pieces of information collected by NSA in just one month (March 2013.)
In the documents—provided to ‘The Hindu’ have a heat map show countries color codes based on how extensively they were being targeted by the NSA. India is placed between Iran and Pakistan (both red) and China and the U.S. (both light orange).
Upon asking by The Hindu “why a friendly country like India was subjected to so much surveillance by the U.S,” a spokesman of the U.S. government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded:
| The U.S. government will respond through diplomatic channels to our partners and allies. While we are not going to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity, as a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations. We value our cooperation with all countries on issues of mutual concern. |
VIA– The Hindu
