And not just the NSA. Despite their feigned outrage every time stuff like this hits the news, both Germany and France actively spy on US government and industry all the time. Every nation spies on every other nation, friend or foe, to look out for their own national interests.
> Bernard Squarcini, head of the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI) intelligence service until last year, told French daily Le Figaro he was “astonished” when Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he was "deeply shocked" by the claims.
> “I am amazed by such disconcerting naiveté,” he said in the interview. “You’d almost think our politicians don’t bother to read the reports they get from the intelligence services.”
> “The French intelligence services know full well that all countries, whether or not they are allies in the fight against terrorism, spy on each other all the time,” he said.
> “The Americans spy on French commercial and industrial interests, and we do the same to them because it’s in the national interest to protect our companies.”
> “There was nothing of any real surprise in this report,” he added. “No one is fooled.”
> The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, reportedly monitored email addresses at the White House with a list of some 4,000 selector keywords between 1998 and 2006. Other targets included the US Department of State and Department of Treasury, as well as a number of defense agencies including the US Air Force and the Marine Corps, and the NASA space agency.
I think Squarcini might have a bit of a bias towards minimizing the importance of that kind of spying, since France is one of the most aggressive state-sponsors of industrial espionage, after China and the US.
But the gist of the article is "yeah, of course they're going to do it, if we give them the opportunity".
We european countries really shouldn't be giving the US so much opportunity to spy on us.
I admit that's something I said without thorough research. It's just something that pops up in discussions about industrial espionage, or about the DGSE, or about the french military-industrial complex.
So Germany was being spied on while developing a system to spy on others, preferring to introduce a US Trojan horse in the EU through it rather than develop it in the European structure because it is French-dominated...
https://www.france24.com/en/20131024-nsa-france-spying-squar...
> Bernard Squarcini, head of the Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur (DCRI) intelligence service until last year, told French daily Le Figaro he was “astonished” when Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said he was "deeply shocked" by the claims.
> “I am amazed by such disconcerting naiveté,” he said in the interview. “You’d almost think our politicians don’t bother to read the reports they get from the intelligence services.”
> “The French intelligence services know full well that all countries, whether or not they are allies in the fight against terrorism, spy on each other all the time,” he said.
> “The Americans spy on French commercial and industrial interests, and we do the same to them because it’s in the national interest to protect our companies.”
> “There was nothing of any real surprise in this report,” he added. “No one is fooled.”
https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-spied-on-white-hou...
> The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, reportedly monitored email addresses at the White House with a list of some 4,000 selector keywords between 1998 and 2006. Other targets included the US Department of State and Department of Treasury, as well as a number of defense agencies including the US Air Force and the Marine Corps, and the NASA space agency.