German leader calls Obama about alleged cellphone tapping Obama told Merkel, an ally who has been upset since the extent of the U.S. surveillance programs was disclosed several months ago, that the United States is not eavesdropping on her telephone calls, the White House said Wednesday. Reports in Germany raised fears that such spying was taking place. On Monday, Obama placed a phone call to France's president, François Hollande, amid furor there over reports that millions of French phone calls had been recorded over a 30-day period last year. A top U.S. intelligence official denied those wiretapping reports Wednesday. The accusations in Germany were prompted by reporting by the news magazine Der Spiegel, which has run many stories based on classified U.S. National Security Agency documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Der Spiegel said on its Web site Wednesday that the German intelligence agencies had, after a review of the magazine's technical data, deemed its information on the monitoring of Merkel's cellphone "over years" plausible enough to confront the U.S. government about it. Merkel told Obama that if the accusations are confirmed, she "unequivocally disapproves of such practices and sees them as completely unacceptable," her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement, adding that any monitoring "would be a grave breach of trust." White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that Obama assured Merkel that the United States "is not monitoring and will not monitor" her phone conversations. Asked whether the statement left open the possibility that the NSA has tracked Merkel's calls in the past, Carney said he did not have an answer to that question. Obama visited Germany in June and met with Merkel, who expressed displeasure that the NSA had been monitoring the communications of German citizens. The new disclosures revived tensions that the White House had hoped had been resolved. Merkel is a famously avid user of text messaging, and she is frequently photographed checking her smartphone during long sessions of Parliament and on the road. Earlier this year, she posed at a technology fair with a secure version of a Blackberry Z10; on the back of the phone was a decal of a black eagle, which is the emblem of modern Germany. Swift condemnation of the United States came from across the political spectrum in Germany, where the news broke late Wednesday. Revelations of NSA spying in Germany has caused major political uproar in the country this year, with investigations and fallout lasting long after outrage over Snowden's revelations had settled in the United States. This month, Deutsche Telekom, Germany's largest Internet and telephone provider, proposed routing important domestic e-mail traffic exclusively within German networks to ensure that it is secure from U.S. intelligence agencies.