This doesn't surprise me at all as the spooky NSA have their eyes and ears everywhere. It's all linked into a Western global intelligence monitoring system called ECHELON or Five Eyes. The five eyes being the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
They can monitor everything; cell phones, telephones, internet, radio, microwave, satellite and fibre optic cables. They have signal intelligence bases on all continents, even within some embassies and the location of some signal stations are unknown to even their own governments. They even tap into submarine fibre optic cables which carries 90% of all international communications traffic, the British specialise in doing this. Very little information gets past them including global financial and bank transactions and data. No country is off limits to their snooping including China, Russia and most other Western and allied governments.
The NSA is also suspected to be running a top secret cyber-espionage unit known as the Equation Group, a name given by Russia's Kapersky Lab who discovered some of their cyber programmes. The cyber snooping or hacking capabilities of Equation is considered at least a generation ahead of any other government. Its true capabilities are unknown but would be at least on a par with what you saw in the latest Jason Bourne movie. The NSA more than likely cooperates with British and Israeli intelligence in developing their cyber warfare capabilities and I'd say the Chinese and Russian have nightmares even thinking about what they could do to them.
I don't think the NSA is allowed to randomly spy on American citizens in the United States, so they use Britain's GCHQ for that purpose!! The Brit's in turn use the NSA to do the same to British citizens.
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