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France evicted from moral high ground over spying revelations
France has joined the US and UK on an ignoble list of countries intercepting international communications, according to a report from L'Observateur. The news follows a Wikileaks article detailing how the NSA recorded highly sensitive calls placed by three different French Presidents. The paper noted that since France was allegedly doing something similar, it may explain why President Francois Hollande had a muted response to the earlier revelation, calling it merely "unacceptable." Meanwhile, it's getting hard to keep track of who's spying on who without a cheat sheet -- not even counting spying done by nations on their own citizens.
Orange shares all its call data with France's intelligence agency, according to new Snowden leak
Another day, another round of troubling surveillance news. In a twist, though, today's nugget has less to do with the US or the NSA but rather, France's central intelligence agency, the DGSE. According to a leak by Edward Snowden to the French paper Le Monde, Orange, the country's leading telecom, has been willingly sharing all of its call data with the agency. And according to the leaked document -- originally belonging to the UK intelligence agency GCHQ -- the French government's records don't just include metadata, but all the information Orange has on file. As you might expect, the DGSE then shares this information with other countries, including, of course, the UK, which had this incriminating document in the first place.
France reportedly has its own PRISM-like data surveillance system
The US isn't the only western country with an all-seeing digital eye... at least, according to Le Monde. The news outlet claims that France's General Directorate for External Security has a PRISM-like system that captures and processes the metadata for "billions and billions" of communications, including internet messaging, phone calls, SMS and even faxes. The goal is ostensibly to track the behavior of terrorist cells, but the Directorate allegedly shares the anonymized information with other intelligence services, including the police. Whether or not residents can do much about the snooping, if real, is another matter. One source believes that it exists in a gray area, as French law reportedly doesn't account for the possibility of storing personal data this way. We're skeptical of claims that the Directorate can spy on "anyone, anytime," especially without official commentary, but we'd suggest that locals be careful with their secrets all the same. Dan Cooper contributed to this report.
