Some elements of Le Monde's information have been reported in both German Der Spiegel and British The Guardian, but others are being published for the first time.
Among the thousands of documents Snowden obtained from the NSA is a chart detailing the extent of telephone surveillance and wiretapping in France. It shows that in a 30-day period (from December 10, 2012 to January 8, 2013) 70.3 million phone records were made by the NSA.
The service appears to "exploit" several data collection methods in France: According to the publication, when a phone number is used in France, it activates a signal that automatically gives the order to record the call.
Apparently, it is reported, this surveillance system also records SMS messages and their content using keywords. The NSA also apparently records the metadata of each target's conversations.
Paris demands explanations, US ambassador summoned
The official reactions from the French government came a few hours after the publication, with the Interior Ministry describing the reports as unacceptable and the Foreign Ministry summoning the American ambassador.
Speaking about the "scorching" revelation, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said that "if an allied country carries out surveillance in France, it is unacceptable.".
"I immediately summoned the American ambassador to the Foreign Ministry," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in a statement on Monday morning.
The report follows a tsunami of revelations about large-scale surveillance in other European countries that have provoked strong reactions, such as in the case of Germany. The French surveillance is recorded under the code US-985D. The exact explanation of this code is not known to this day from the Snowden documents or from former NSA members. By comparison, the codes used by the NSA for the same type of surveillance targeting Germany are US-987LA and US-987LB.
According to the same sources, this series of codes corresponds to what the US calls “third parties,” a category that includes France, Germany, Austria, Poland, and Belgium. The “second parties,” also known as the “Five Eyes,” refers to English-speaking countries—Washington’s historical allies, namely Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The category of "first party" concerns the 16 American intelligence agencies, of which the NSA has emerged as the most important, according to a senior French intelligence official.
The NSA chart shows an average of three million data intercepts per day, with nearly seven million on December 24, 2012, and January 7, 2013. But there appear to have been no phone intercepts between December 28 and 31. This pause could be attributed to the time it took the US Congress in late December 2012 to review Section 702 of the Foreign Electronic Intelligence Act.
One of the documents obtained by Le Monde indicates that between February 8 and March 8, 2013, the NSA collected 124.8 billion telephone records and 97.1 billion computer records worldwide. In Europe, only Germany and Britain surpass France in the number of intercepted telephone conversations.
DOL Newsroom, with information from APE/French
Source: news.in.gr
