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Spain demands US explain 'monitoring'

Spain has urged the US to give details of any eavesdropping amid reports it monitored 60 million Spanish phone calls in a month.

The US ambassador to Spain, who had been summoned by the EU minister, vowed to clear the "doubts" that had arisen about his country's alleged espionage.

The minister said such practices, if true, were "inappropriate and unacceptable".

An EU delegation is to meet officials in Washington to convey concerns.

The officials from the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs are shortly expected to speak to members of the US Congress and security officials to gather information about the recent allegations of US spying on European leaders and citizens.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also sending German intelligence officials to Washington to demand answers to claims that her phones were tapped for a decade.

'Lull for Christmas'

The latest allegations, published by Spain's El Mundo newspaper, is that the US National Security Agency (NSA) tracked tens of millions of phone calls of Spanish citizens, in December 2012 and January of this year.

The monitoring allegedly peaked on the 11th December, and there was a lull over Christmas.

It is not clear how the alleged surveillance was carried out, whether it was from monitoring fibre-optic cables, data (including metadata) obtained from telecommunication companies, or other means.

Reports say the NSA collected the numbers and locations of the callers and the recipients, but not the calls' content.


Source: BBC

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