A general view of the large former monitoring base of the U.S. intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) in Bad Aibling south of Munich, June 18, 2013. 
 
 BERLIN The United States has bugged European Union offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks, according to secret documents cited in a German magazine on Saturday, the latest in a series of exposures of alleged U.S. spy programs. 
 
 Der Spiegel quoted from a September 2010 "top secret" U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) document that it said fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had taken with him, and the weekly's journalists had seen in part. 
 
 The document outlines how the NSA bugged offices and spied on EU internal computer networks in Washington and at the United Nations, not only listening to conversations and phone calls but also gaining access to documents and emails. 
 
 The document explicitly called the EU a "target". 
 
 A spokesman for the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence had no comment on the Der Spiegel story. 
 
 Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, said that if the report was correct, it would have a "severe impact" on relations between the EU and the United States. 
 
 "On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the U.S. authorities with regard to these allegations," he said in an emailed statement. 
 
 Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told Der Spiegel: "If these reports are true, it's disgusting. 
 
 "The United States would be better off monitoring its secret services rather than its allies. We must get a guarantee from the very highest level now that this stops immediately." 
 
 Snowden's disclosures in foreign media about U.S. surveillance programs have ignited a political furor in the United States and abroad over the balance between privacy rights and national security. 
 
 According to Der Spiegel, the NSA also targeted telecommunications at the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, home to the European Council, the collective of EU national governments. 
 
 Without citing sources, the magazine reported that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls and traced them to NSA offices within the NATO compound in Brussels. 
 
 Each EU member state has rooms in Justus Lipsius with phone and internet connections, which ministers can use. 
 
 Snowden, a U.S. citizen, fled the United States to Hong Kong in May, a few weeks before the publication in the Guardian and the Washington Post of details he provided about secret U.S. government surveillance of internet and phone traffic. 
 
 Snowden, 30, has been holed up in a Moscow airport transit area since last weekend. The leftist government of Ecuador is reviewing his request for asylum. 
 
 (Reporting by Annika Breidthardt and Ben Deighton in Brussels; Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Eric Beech) ||||| BERLIN — Continuing revelations, based on documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, of sweeping American digital surveillance around the world are rattling the close ties between the United States and Germany. 
 
 In a country scarred by Nazi and Communist pasts, the issue is prompting not just a debate about privacy and data protection, but also demands from German officials that the Berlin-Washington security partnership be put on a new footing. 
 
 The latest of the Snowden revelations came on Sunday, when the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel published a report, citing documents Mr. Snowden obtained while he worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency, that said the agency had succeeded in tapping into videoconferences at the United Nations in New York, into the European Union’s mission to the United Nations, and into other diplomatic missions around the world. 
 
 Evidence that the United States has been spying extensively on its allies as well as on its enemies has been among the most significant revelations from Mr. Snowden, along with widespread government surveillance of the telephone and digital communications of American citizens without warrants. 
 
 The Der Spiegel article on Sunday was not the first to reveal American eavesdropping at the United Nations, which many diplomats have assumed for years was taking place. But it added extensive new detail to what had previously been reported, and it may compound the frictions developing between the United States and its allies over the issue — especially with Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is in the midst of an election campaign. 
 
 Top German officials traveled to Washington this month to press an unusual demand: to negotiate a new formal agreement with the United States that neither side will spy on the other. 
 
 The initiative was confirmed in two sittings of the German parliamentary committee in charge of overseeing the country’s intelligence agencies. Ronald Pofalla, who runs Ms. Merkel’s Chancellery, told the committee on Aug. 12 that the two countries were working on just such an agreement. He gave no details, and none leaked out afterward in German media reports. 
 
 Neither side will say anything official about the proposed accord. Observers on both sides of the Atlantic say that even if such an agreement proves to be feasible, it will probably have to wait until after the German elections on Sept. 22. 
 
 It was not known whether Der Spiegel planned to publish further revelations from Snowden documents before then. Opinion polls in Germany suggest that Ms. Merkel’s strong standing with voters has not been damaged by the issue, nor has it displaced the weather or vacations as topics of summer conversation here. 
 
 But in the eyes of a skeptical, privacy-minded German public, at least, Der Spiegel’s report may have undercut the significance of the proposed accord by noting that the eavesdropping described in the Snowden documents would have violated agreements that the United States has made. 
 
 The report said that the N.S.A. succeeded last year in cracking an encrypted video teleconferencing system at the United Nations, and even stumbled across Chinese spies who were apparently invading the same communications system. The magazine also published a floor plan, evidently from N.S.A. files, of the third floor of the European mission to the United Nations on Third Avenue in New York, showing the locations of offices and computer servers. Der Spiegel suggested that the spying on allies and the United Nations made President Obama’s defense of surveillance programs as a counterterrorism effort seem misleading at best. 
 
 For the German government, the whole affair is frustrating. One senior official who spoke on the condition of anonymity argued that Ms. Merkel had generally done a good job of keeping foreign affairs and controversy out of domestic politics, only to have Mr. Snowden’s revelations capture world attention just as she was preparing to receive Mr. Obama in Berlin in June, depart on vacation in July and open the final stage of her election campaign in August. ||||| According to a report in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, the US National Security Agency bugged institutions of the European Union. The magazine cited documents provided by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. 
 
 Spiegel reported in its Saturday online edition that the NSU used bugs, phone taps and cybermonitoring to obtain information from EU institutions in Washington, DC, New York and Brussels. 
 
 Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who recently leaked classified documents about the monitoring program, provided the documents the magazine cited in its report. 
 
 The documents, marked "top secret" and dated September 2010, specifically name the EU as a "target" for surveillance. The NSA appears to have had access to telephone calls, computer documents and emails. 
 
 Part of the surveillance included monitoring the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels (pictured above) where the European Council is housed. Every EU member nation has rooms in the building which can be used for phone calls or to access the internet. 
 
 Spiegel reports that five years ago, EU security officers had investigated a series of missed calls to NSA offices located in NATO facilities in Brussels. 
 
 Snowden fled the United States in May before the initial stories of the NSA's secret phone and data monitoring program were published. The extent of the government monitoring continues to grow as Snowden shares more leaked documents with news outlets. 
 
 He is currently believed to be in a transit center at a Moscow airport. The US has called for Snowden's extradition and arrest on espionage charges. He had previously been in Hong Kong, and has submitted an asylum request to the government of Ecuador. 
 
 mz/dr (Reuters, dpa)
– In what could prove to be the most damaging Snowden leak yet, the National Security Agency bugged the United Nations headquarters in New York, as well as at least 80 embassies and consulates around the globe, according to der Spiegel. The agency's experts cracked the code last year, with one of them reporting "the data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!)," the German magazine reports, citing documents obtained by the NSA leaker. During the surveillance—which violated US agreements with the UN—the NSA snoops discovered some Chinese spies were also listening in. The bugging program the agency calls its "Special Collection Service" also targeted the European Union's UN mission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, reports der Spiegel, which says "the surveillance is intensive and well organized and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists." American snooping on the United Nations has been reported before, the New York Times notes, but the Snowden files provide much more information on the program and are likely to do more damage to US relations with allies including Germany. In other Snowden news, Reuters reports that it was Cuba's refusal to let the NSA leaker in that left him stranded for six weeks in the Moscow airport.