Turkish pro-government media have claimed a group of anti-government prosecutors have illegally wiretapped thousands of prominent figures.
Targets reportedly included government ministers and business leaders.
The prosecutors, who are said to be loyal to US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, have denied the accusations.
Fethullah Gulen has been accused of running a “parallel state” in Turkey, controlling groups of police, lawyers and politicians. He denies the claims.
The latest allegations came in two pro-government newspapers, Yeni Safak and Star.
Fethullah Gulen has been accused of running a “parallel state” in Turkey, controlling groups of police, lawyers and politicians
The Star reported that “Gulenists” had wiretapped more than 7,000 people since 2011 on the pretext of trying to uncover terrorism plots.
One of the prosecutors named in the stories, Adem Ozcan, denied the allegations.
“There was definitely no monitoring or phone-tapping of thousands of politicians, writers, NGO representatives and businessmen in the framework of this dossier in the way that the newspaper stories say,” he said in a statement.
Fethullah Gulen has denied using his influence to start investigations into allegations of government corruption.
PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Fethullah Gulen, a one-time ally who lives in self-imposed exile in the US, of trying to attack the government.
Four ministers have resigned in the aftermath of the corruption inquiries.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan has pledged to fight on, in what is seen as the biggest challenge to his government in his 11 years in office.
New declassified documents reveal the US National Security Agency spied on Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali during the height of the Vietnam War protests.
The documents show the NSA also tracked journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post and two senators.
Some NSA officials later described the programme as “disreputable if not outright illegal”, the documents show.
The operation, dubbed “Minaret”, was originally exposed in the 1970s.
However, the names of those on the phone-tapping “watch list” had been kept secret until now.
The secret papers were published after a government panel ruled in favor of researchers at George Washington University.
New declassified documents reveal the NSA spied on Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali during the height of the Vietnam War protests
The university’s National Security Archive – a research institute that seeks to check government secrecy – described the names on the NSA’s watch-list as “eye-popping”.
The NSA eavesdropped on civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young as well as boxing champion Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald.
The agency also monitored the overseas phone calls of two prominent US senators – Democrat Frank Church and Republican Howard Baker.
Many of those targeted were considered to be critics of US involvement in the Vietnam War.
In 1967 the strength of the anti-war campaign led President Lyndon Johnson to ask US intelligence agencies to find out if some protests were being stoked by foreign governments.
The NSA worked with other spy agencies to draw up the “watch lists” of anti-war critics, tapping their phone calls.
The programme continued after President Richard Nixon entered the White House in 1969. US Attorney General Elliot Richardson shut down the NSA programme in 1973, just as the Nixon administration was engulfed in the Watergate scandal.
The latest revelations come as the NSA is embroiled in fresh controversy over its surveillance programmes.
US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden recently exposed far-reaching electronic surveillance of phone records and internet traffic by the agency.
Researchers Matthew Aid and William Burr, who published the documents on Wednesday, said the spying abuses during the Vietnam War era far surpassed any excesses of the current programme.
“As shocking as the recent revelations about the NSA’s domestic eavesdropping have been, there has been no evidence so far of today’s signal intelligence corps taking a step like this, to monitor the White House’s political enemies,” they wrote.
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