German Chancellor Angela Merkel was only one of the 35 foreign politicians to be regularly spied on by U.S. Government. Two weeks ago, the White House had admitted to tapping into her phone line since 2010, stopping them last summer. With the tension caused by the NSA leaks, and privacy concerns popping up around the world, this will only escalate public’s concern.

The NSA has received much negative attention from the American public, primarily after the leaks from Edward Snowden in July. A response to this dissent was actually put to vote in congress, on a bill that would defund this organization. Losing by 12 votes (217-205) in the House of Representatives, and, in a rare moment of party compromise, the NSA remains functioning, albeit under the American people’s bitter contempt.

Allegedly, President Obama had no knowledge of this occurrence. In response to the incident, he says that he’s now ”initiating a review to make sure that what they’re able to do doesn’t necessarily mean what they should be doing”, as the capability of the NSA is improving with their technology. He did, however, defend the further activity of the NSA, saying “The national security operations generally have one purpose, and that is to make sure that the American people are safe.”

The senior administration official said that “It’s not reasonable to expect that the President would have been involved in or necessarily briefed on decisions about individual intelligence ‘targets’”. He’s also made it clear that the NSA has not gone “out-of-bounds” with its actions. If the NSA isn’t going to be punished for this leak, what will? How far will they have to go until they lose the Government’s favor?