Malaysia’s political leadership is a priority intelligence target for the United States and Australia, according to top secret documents published by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine.

Former Malaysian Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi, who served as Malaysian prime minister from October 2003 to April 2009, is listed in an extract from the US National Security Agency’s "Target Knowledge Base", a database designed to build up “complete profiles” of high priority intelligence targets.

Edward Snowden: Gained access to high-classified documents using a web crawler. Credit:Getty Images

Abdullah Badawi’s name appears in a list of eleven heads of government, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The top secret briefing, created in 2009, indicates that the full list of targeted heads of foreign governments contained 122 names. The final name on the list is Yulia Tymoshenko, who was Ukrainian prime minister at the time.

According to Der Spiegel a National Security Agency search program codenamed "Nymrod" enables intelligence analysis to search the database to "find information relating to targets that would otherwise be tough to track down". Nymrod sifts through signals intelligence reports based on intercepted communications as well as transcripts of faxes, phone calls, and data collected from computer networks. Each of the names in the database is considered a "SIGINT target" with automated data processing making it possible to manage more than 3 million entries.