France spying on its own citizens
‘Big Brother Français’ secret service has been tapping in on phone calls, texts, internet use and emails for years
FRANCE has been accused of spying on its own citizens in the same way as the US National Security Agency was spying on Americans and European allies.
Newspaper Le Monde said spy agency DGSE had tapped in on phone calls, text messages, internet use and emails in a vast spying system similar to that exposed by US fugitive Edward Snowden, who was yesterday refused asylum in France.
The database of information, which has been collected and stored for years, is available to six other government agencies, including those covering financial fraud, money laundering, Customs and police.
Calling it the “Big Brother Français”, the paper said it was the little brother of the US operation and smaller than that run by GCHQ in the UK. It mapped out “who was talking to whom”.
DGSE technical director Bernard Barbier estimated that already this year they had found four billion connected items from a flow of one billion simultaneous communications. “Today our targets are public networks, because they are used by terrorists.”
Le Monde said: “All our communications are spied on” and it added that France’s weak condemnation of the revelation that the US was spying on all European countries and their communications was “for two excellent reasons: Paris already knew about it, and it was doing the same thing".
However, the paper said the spying programme was bordering on illegal and "outside any serious control".
