This is the catch-all term for malevolent software that infects an individual's computer to monitor communications for confidential information such as banking passwords, credit card details and social media logins.
A unit called Special Collection Services, based on the fourth floor of the US embassy in Pariser Platz in Berlin, was responsible for monitoring communications in the German capital's government quarter, including those targeting Mrs Merkel.
"It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years.
Dr. Wyss-Coray, who is also at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health System, said that monitoring communications between cells might be a way to develop diagnostic tests for other diseases.
In September 2006, the inspector general of the Department of Justice reported that the Bureau of Prisons had moved forward on "several ongoing and proposed initiatives to improve the monitoring of communications for terrorist and other high-risk inmates".
That law, among other things, granted authorities more expansive powers to monitor electronic communications for reasons of national security.
According to a poll in the newspaper Die Zeit, about 40 percent of Germans think that governments are right to monitor Internet communications for security reasons.
A former Skype engineer, who declined to be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, told the Guardian that the company worked to build in a "listening element" to help Chinese authorities monitor users' communications for keywords, triggering a warning to alert the government when certain phrases get typed into its chat interface.
Europeans knew the US monitored global communications for signs of terrorist plots.
They include expanding a federal health care program for children, extending legislation allowing intelligence agencies to monitor communications and approving more spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
