MOSCOW, July 5 (RIA Novosti) - France has its own electronic surveillance network, which might be similar to the Prism program in the United States, a leading French newspaper Le Monde said without citing any sources.
The paper said that France’s foreign intelligence agency, the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), “systematically collects the electromagnetic signals emitted by computers and telephones in France, and the flow of signals between France and countries abroad.”
“The entirety of our communications is being spied on. All of our email messages, SMS messages, itemized phone bills and connections to Facebook and Twitter are then stored for years,” reads the English-language version of the article, posted on Le Monde’s website.
According to the article, the systems targets not so much at content of communications, but at its context.
“It is more interesting to know who is speaking to whom than to record what they are saying. More than phone tapping, it’s the technical data - the "metadata" - that is being combed through,” the paper said.
The paper suggests that the data is collected and stored in a massive three-floor underground bunker at the DGSE’s headquarters in Paris. The data is regularly accessed by other agencies, including the Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence, the customs service and the Tracfin anti-money-laundering service.
According to Le Monde, certain details of the system have in past emerged in open-access sources.
In his comments citied by “a few specialized sites,” DGSE technical chief Bernard Barbier, spoke of "the development of a calculator based on FPGA" - Field Programmable Gate Array, or an integrated circuit that may be programmed for logical functions - that is "probably the biggest data processing center in Europe after the English," the paper said.
It is yet unclear whether the French surveillance system goes as far as Prism, the US electronic surveillance network exposed by fugitive former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
Associated Press reported that Patricia Adam, a French lawmaker who until last year headed parliament’s intelligence committee, had played down the report, saying that French surveillance experts “are line fishing, not trawling” the vast oceans of data thrown up by mobile phones, emails and Internet communication.
Updated clarifying headline
