Sources: NSA continued to spy on some allies after Snowden leaks, also capturing communications with US lawmakers and Jewish groups
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands squarely in the post-Snowden accountability arc: reporting that the NSA not only kept spying on some allies after the leaks but swept up communications involving US lawmakers and Jewish groups extends the scandal from foreign partners to domestic political actors. The related coverage shows the pattern was already visible weeks later, when the NSA and GCHQ were found to have used open-source software to spy on Israeli and Syrian drones.
First-order effects
- Allied governments named in the reporting face immediate pressure to re-evaluate intelligence-sharing with Washington, while US lawmakers whose communications were intercepted gain fresh grounds for congressional oversight hearings.
- The disclosure undercuts the post-Snowden reform narrative that surveillance of allies had been curtailed, forcing the White House and NSA into another round of damage control with both foreign capitals and domestic constituencies.
Second-order effects
- Israel's posture is especially delicate: the same coverage shows a deep working relationship with the NSA, including Israel tipping off the agency after hacking Kaspersky's network and discovering Russian spies hunting US intel documents ([[a:923038]]), so revelations of continued NSA spying cut against an otherwise close partnership.
- Commercial spyware vendors stand to benefit diplomatically — governments burned by NSA collection have turned toward tools like NSO Group's, which the FBI has probed since 2017 for its role in hacks of US residents and intel gathering on governments ([[a:950123]]) — shifting demand from state-run interception to deniable private channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — allied spying continuing despite reform pledges — the structural consequence is a two-tier intelligence order where formal Five Eyes-style partnerships coexist with covert collection against the very same allies, eroding trust-based sharing over time.
- The line between state espionage and commercial spyware keeps blurring: as agencies like the NSA persist in allied collection, governments increasingly reach for private vendors such as NSO, normalizing a market that eventually turns on its own customers, as the targeting of senior EU officials with Israeli spyware showed ([[a:977798]]).
The trend: Post-Snowden reforms have not ended allied surveillance but pushed it into a gray zone where official partnerships, covert collection, and commercial spyware vendors increasingly substitute for one another.