A U.S. government paper released on Sunday states that among millions of phone and email records collected by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2012, only fewer than 300 phone numbers were really searched in order to obtain detailed information.

The paper is obviously not meant only for internal consumption. On Monday, President Barack Obama started his European tour, beginning with the G8 summit in Northern Ireland. While Obama's primary task is to persuade his partners to agree to the U.S.’s plans to provide arms to the al-Qaeda-backed insurgency in Syria, the surveillance program presents a serious obstacle for achieving this task. America's European allies have already expressed their deep concern over the program.
It will also definitely loom over Obama's subsequent trip to Berlin. Last Friday, after the U.S. – German cyber meeting in Washington, Germany insisted on including a reference to this concern in the joint statement.
Indeed, if the matter were limited to suspected terrorists, this could possibly be handled with little effort. After all, when it comes to protecting citizens from greater danger, the public generally tends to agree to certain limitations of freedoms, including even the right to privacy.
But the new revelations published by London's Guardian demonstrate that the surveillance program went beyond simply detecting terrorist plots.
According to the story, foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts.
The methods used by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) included setting up fake internet cafés in order to intercept the delegates' email correspondence, as well as tapping the foreigners' smartphones. Among the people whose correspondence was monitored was the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, as well as officials from such U.S. and U.K.'s allies such as Turkey and South Africa.
This raises further questions about the boundaries of surveillance by the GCHQ and its American sister organization, the NSA. The question is especially awkward noting that the leak was made public on the eve of another summit – the G8, which started on Monday in Northern Ireland (nominally, a part of the U.K., as well as the venue for the 2009 summit meetings in question).
In fact there may be only two conclusions.
One – the U.S. administration is as usual lying that the surveillance program was limited to a handful of terrorists only. In reality, it has a much wider scope.
Or, there could be another explanation – that the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services have a much wider interpretation of what they perceive as terrorism. In this sense, it does not only include some bearded guys from the Middle East (in fact, as Barack Obama's plans regarding Syria show, such guys are no longer regarded as terrorists, but rather as faithful allies). It also includes in the list of potential terrorist leaders of the most influential nations, including the U.S. and their younger brother's allies.
Boris Volkhonsky, senior research fellow, Russian Institute for Strategic Studies