On Sunday it was revealed that the NSA, forbidden by President Obama from tapping German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone directly, has ramped up its spying on her senior government officials, according to the German Sunday paper Bild am Sonntag. The paper said that the information's source is an anonymous, high-ranking NSA official stationed in Germany.

In October, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the US had been spying on Chancellor Merkel for years, tapping her phone and the phones of 34 other world leaders. The sources of the fall accusations were damning, and they led one German politician to call for a complete halt to trade negotiations between the European Union and the US. In January, President Obama ordered the NSA to stop spying on the leaders of US-allied nations.

Still, that moratorium on spying didn't extend beyond those world leaders, and Reuters, translating from the BamS source, writes that the source said, “We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly.” Specifically, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel's confidants, was called out as being a target of the NSA's increased spying efforts.

When the news broke in October that the US was spying on Merkel, de Maiziere was one of the most vocal German officials to decry the US' practices. “If that is true, what we hear, then that would be really bad,” de Maiziere told ARD, a German public broadcaster, in October. “It really can’t work like this. We can’t simply go back to business as usual."