Survey Report

In the wake of reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been listening to phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other heads of state, a 56% majority of Americans say it is unacceptable for the U.S. to monitor the phones of allied leaders, while 36% say the practice is acceptable.

There are virtually no partisan differences in these opinions. Roughly equal shares of partisans — 57% of Republicans, 53% of Democrats and 56% of independents — say that the practice is unacceptable.

News reports indicate that President Obama was unaware of the program to tap Merkel’s phone and that he might ban future eavesdropping of allied leaders.

The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Oct. 31-Nov. 3 among 1,002 adults, finds that 22% say they very closely followed reports about the U.S. government’s phone and internet surveillance programs. That is similar to the share that paid very close attention to stories about government surveillance in September and over the summer. Attention was highest in mid-June, when 35% said they were following reports about the initial disclosures by Edward Snowden.

The public followed reports about the government’s surveillance programs less closely than news about the new health insurance exchanges (32%) and the U.S. economy (31%). By comparison, 16% followed baseball’s World Series very closely.

As in recent weeks, adults younger than 30 are following news about health care implementation less than are older adults. Just 15% of those younger than 30 say they followed news about health care exchanges very closely, compared with 30% of those 30-49 and 41% of adults 50 and older.

By contrast, 17% of young adults very closely followed news about the government’s surveillance programs, which is not statistically different from other age groups.

The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted October 31-November 3, 2013 among a national sample of 1,002 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States (501 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 501 were interviewed on a cell phone, including 228 who had no landline telephone). The survey was conducted by interviewers at MKTG under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cell phone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult 18 years of age or older. For detailed information about our survey methodology, see: https://alpha.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/politics/methodology/.

The combined landline and cell phone sample are weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin and region to parameters from the 2011 Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and population density to parameters from the Decennial Census. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status, based on extrapolations from the 2012 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cell phones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample and adjusts for household size among respondents with a landline phone. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance take into account the effect of weighting. The following table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey:

Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.

In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.