The National Security Agency has been conducting massive surveillance of people in France, according to a new report from Le Monde, one of France’s largest daily newspapers.

The bilingual French and English editions of Monday’s story were written by Jacques Follorou and Glenn Greenwald. The latter is an American journalist who has been leading the charge of publishing stories worldwide based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"Amongst the thousands of documents extracted from the NSA by its ex-employee there is a graph which describes the extent of telephone monitoring and tapping (DNR—Dial Number Recognition) carried out in France," wrote Follorou and Greenwald. "It can be seen that over a period of thirty days—from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, 70.3 million recordings of French citizens' telephone data were made by the NSA. This agency has several methods of data collection."

The paper added that when a targeted number is used in France, "it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS messages and their content using keywords. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target—or the metadata."

In response, the French government has summoned the American ambassador and has demanded answers from Washington.

"We work in a meaningful way in the field of the fight against terrorism, but it does not justify everything," French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters in Paris, adding that it will require "a very quick clarification," from the US Secretary of State John Kerry, whom he is scheduled to meet (Google Translate) in Paris on Tuesday.

As Ars has reported before, the French prosecutor’s office has already opened an investigation into possible violations of French law sustained during the NSA’s data collection of French citizens. France itself is also conducting some degree of NSA-style metadata gathering with the DGSE, its own foreign intelligence and signals intelligence agency.

As a former intelligence agency head also told Le Monde earlier this summer, "We've been operating in a zone of virtual authorization for years, and each agency is quite content with this freedom, which is possible thanks to the legal vagueness surrounding metadata."

Party down

According to one of the slides Le Monde published (Google Translate), the NSA is also running searches across 45,000 "selectors," filters based on particular keywords and/or other triggers, on French Internet traffic. The searches focus on wandadoo.fr e-mail addresses and traffic over Alcatel Lucent, a major French telecom, in particular. This type of query appears to be similar to the "one side foreign" searches that the NSA runs across American telecom providers in collaboration with foreign governments and corresponding telecoms in other countries as part of XKeyscore.



Le Monde also noted that the program for France has the codename “US-985D,” while related programs in Germany use a similar number, “US-987LA and US-987LB.” Why this particular set of numbers and letters? That remains unknown.

However, the newspaper cites unnamed sources that “98” corresponds to the “third party” of access of intelligence sharing between a number of European (and perhaps other) allies, including France, Germany, Austria, Poland, and Belgium. Data sharing between the American intelligence agencies (of which the NSA is likely the most prominent) constitutes the “first party” of access. Beyond that is the “Five Eyes,” or “second party,” comprising not only the US, but also its other four anglophone allies: Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

If that is indeed the case, it seems likely that the French government (and other European governments) already knew about the NSA’s data collection of French (and presumably other European) citizens long before Snowden.

Previously, in June 2013, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence denied even the ability of the United States to “target anyone… unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition… and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States. We cannot target even foreign persons overseas without a valid foreign intelligence purpose.”

The French paper also noted that among European target countries, “only Germany and the United Kingdom exceed France in terms of numbers of interceptions” and that between February 8 and March 8, 2013, the NSA collected “124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items" worldwide.

But France is hardly the only US ally that has been under heavy surveillance by the NSA. On Sunday, Greenwald's counterpart in Berlin, Laura Poitras, published a new report showing that the NSA has spied on the Mexican president's e-mail, too.

"This practice is unacceptable, illegal, and against Mexican and international law," the Mexican foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday.