Tap on Merkel Provides Peek at Vast Spy Net

In testimony to Congress, the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., gave only the roughest sketch of the size of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, but suggested that the leader of the United States’ most powerful European ally, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, was a single fish in a very big sea.

“We’re talking about a huge enterprise here with thousands and thousands of individual requirements,” he said, using a phrase that appeared to mean individual surveillance targets. Clapper said that the United States spies on foreign leaders and other officials to see “if what they’re saying gels with what’s actually going on,” and how the policies of other countries “impact us across a whole range of issues.” German political and intelligence officials went to the White House on Oct 30 looking for answers to some of the questions the administration has been reluctant to discuss, and eager to use the incident to broker a far closer intelligence-sharing agreement with Washington that, among other things, would end the surveillance of its leaders. If put into effect, such an arrangement could begin to dismantle a system that has grown ever larger, and more sophisticated, during a decade in which supercomputers and the algorithms used to search vast databases have put the NSA far ahead of rival intelligence services. President Obama has asked whether the technology has outrun common sense, and the Merkel episode has raised in a very public way the question of whether the benefits of spying on friends outweigh the damage if such spying becomes known.