French spying 'out of control'
Date July 5, 2013
France's government is accused of illegal spying on its own citizens. Photo: Mayu Kanamori
The French government spies on its own citizens in the same way as the United States, according to a leading newspaper.
All phone calls, emails, text messages, faxes and internet searches are monitored by the French security services - the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), according to a report in the French newspaper Le Monde on Thursday. The practice is illegal.
The epicentre of the spying operation is a three-storey underground bunker in Paris's 20th arrondissement, at the DGSE's headquarters on Boulevard Mortier. The building contains a "supercalculator capable of managing tens of millions of gigaoctets of information".
The French authorities do not note the content of the communications, the newspaper claims, but instead are interested in establishing links between known figures in a terrorist network.
"The politicians know about it, but secrecy is the rule: this French Big Brother is clandestine," wrote Jacques Follorou and Franck Johannes. "It is out of control."
The series of revelations will be highly embarrassing to Francois Hollande, the French president, who has expressed outrage at US interception of French communications. "We cannot accept this kind of behaviour between partners and allies," Mr Hollande said last week. "We ask that this immediately must stop."
The United States has proposed holding talks on Monday "on the collection and oversight of intelligence, and questions of privacy and data protection", in an attempt to quell the anger. Yet yesterday, as Manuel Valls, the interior minister, was telling guests at the American Ambassador's July 4 party in Paris that such spying was unacceptable, it was alleged that France was doing the same. France's National Commission for Information and Liberty denied that it was engaged in illicit work.
A la Americain
But others were adamant that France was spying on people in the same way as the Americans. "Welcome to the age in which we are all under virtual authorisation," said one former employee. "And each government agency makes the most of it."
The activities mentioned are similar to those carried out by America's National Security Agency, as described in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor.
The documents revealed that the NSA has access to vast amounts of internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies such as Facebook and Google, under a program known as Prism. They also showed that the US government had gathered metadata - such as the time, duration and numbers called - on all telephone calls carried by service providers.
Such was his anger that Mr Hollande threatened to pull out of negotiations on a transatlantic free trade treaty.
Germany, which was also shown to have been put under American surveillance, told the US: "We aren't in the Cold War any more."
President Barack Obama tried to defuse the row, but the European Parliament in Strasbourg has agreed to start an investigation into claims that European Union offices were bugged.
