While the U.S. government keeps on insisting that the surveillance program was a limited one and designed to protect the United States and other countries from terrorist and other threats, new leaks reveal that the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services eavesdropped on world leaders at conferences in London in 2009. This included setting up fake internet cafés in order to intercept foreign delegates' emails as well as tapping the phones. The eavesdropping program was not limited to potential adversaries, but included the U.S. and U.K.'s allies as well.
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.