France also collects data, paper says
PARIS — A leading French newspaper says France’s intelligence services have put in place a giant electronic-informationgathering network.
Citing no sources, the newspaper Le Monde said France’s foreign intelligence agency systematically collects information about all electronic data sent by computers and telephones in France, as well as communications between France and abroad.
Data on “all emails, SMSs, telephone calls, Facebook and Twitter posts” are collected and stored in a massive three-floor underground bunker at the intelligence agency’s headquarters in Paris, Le Monde said. The paper specified that it is the communications’ metadata — such as when a call was made and where a person was when sending an email — that is being archived, not their content.
Officials at the agency did not answer phone calls or emails seeking comment Thursday.
The archive, which Le Monde says amounts to tens of millions of gigabytes, is accessible by France’s other spy agencies, including the Paris police and a special financial crimes task force.
Le Monde compared the French digital dragnet to PRISM, the U.S. National Security Agency program that caught the attention of Internet users after leaks by former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden. But PRISM appears aimed at allowing U.S. spies to peel data off the servers of Silicon Valley firms, whereas the program described in Le Monde appears to be fed through the mass interception of electronic data bouncing across the world.
In addition, PRISM can apparently be used to collect content, not just metadata.
Le Monde said the French program relies on spy satellites, listening stations in French territories or former colonies and information harvested from undersea cables.
French lawmaker Patricia Adam played down the report, saying France’s surveillance system is not comparable to the NSA’s.
Adam, who until last year headed Parliament’s intelligence committee, said French spies “are line fishing, not trawling ” the vast oceans of data thrown up by cellphones, emails and Internet communication.