Le nouveau datacenter de la NSA à Bluffdale, dans l'Utah, le 8 octobre 2013. AFP/GEORGE FREY

Lire la version française de l'article : Les services secrets américains très intéressés par Wanadoo et Alcatel-Lucent

The web woven by the NSA and revealed by Edward Snowden, the ex-consultant of the largest American Intelligence Agency is today symbolic of size on a gigantic scale. Today we know more about the procedures and the scale of the American intrusion. We know that the United States search through the secrets of their allies as well as of their enemies. On the other hand, to date few elements have filtered out concerning the other aspect of this espionage, featuring the individuals or firms targeted by the American government.

This facet, undoubtedly the most explicit in terms of violation of public and individual civil liberties therefore does not only concern countries considered as enemies but also friendly nations, like France, at the heart of the NSA's centres of interest. The Snowden documents, unpublished to date, to which Le Monde has been able to have access, illustrate this intrusion, on a vast scale, both into the private space of French citizens as well as into the secrets of major national firms.

The most recent proof of this espionage appears in a document dated April 2013, in the course of a page of an instruction manual for the PRISM programme, revealed by Mr Snowden which explains to the NSA analysts, in 41 pages, how to use this tool intended for the collection of data on the servers of the major American access providers such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook or Google.

One of the worksheets in the manual explains to the analysts that they must not restrict their searches to the PRISM programme alone. They must also extract information from another source known by the name of ‘Upstream', which enables the interception of communications which transit by the submarine cables and internet infrastructures. In the course of a list of 35 IP addresses chosen to demonstrate the interest of this wider-ranging quest, we discover that the NSA is interested in almost everything to do with wanadoo.fr and alcatel-lucent.fr.

Wanadoo is a former subsidiary of France Télécom which launched its activity as an internet access provider in 1995; in 2006 its activities were incorporated into the Orange brand. One third of the clients of Orange, or 4.5 million people, still use the wanadoo.fr address today. There is no reason not to think that the American agency is also connected to a number of other French addresses, starting with those of Orange, SFR, Bouygues or Free.

When questioned, Orange's head office refused to comment.

As to Alcatel-Lucent, formed by the merger in 2006 between the French group Alcatel and the American Lucent Technologies, the firm employs over 70,000 persons and works in the sensitive sector of equipping communication networks. Alcatel-Lucent has pioneering devices (pépites) like network core routers which organize the transport of digital data or the activity of laying submarine cables through which the major part of world communications flows are transmitted. At the end of 2012 Bercy studied the possibility of the total or partial takeover of Alcatel's assets by Orange.

In mid-January, Fleur Pellerin, Minister in charge of SME's, Innovation and Digital Economy referred to the possibility of the FSI (Strategic Fund for Investment) held by the Caisse des Dépôts and the French State investing in Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN), Alcatel-Lucent's submarine optic fibre cable subsidiary, a ‘strategic' interest in particular in relation to ‘cybersurveillance' and ‘national security'.To clarify her meaning, the Minister stated, without referring to the United States, that she was in favour of ‘a solution which maintains the integrity of ASN and its national base'.

Questioned by Le Monde on several occasions, both on aspects of American electronic espionage in relation to an industrial firm subject to French jurisdiction, as well as on the problems raised by her declarations concerning the security of submarine communications, Mme Pellerin refused to reply. A high level source at the Ministry of Defense indicated, on their side, that ‘Mme Pellerin's statement publicly admitting that the submarine cables and the mooring points of these cables on the continents were nests of espionage was a grave error'. When questioned, Alcatel refused to comment on this information.

The internal NSA document accessed by Le Monde gives few details on the criteria of interception of the data which circulate on the wanadoo.fr and alcatel-lucent.com addresses. However, from other information revealed by Edward Snowden it is known that the Upstream source can target both the addresses as such, which means that the NSA can stock the totality of the information which is there as well as the key words which trigger off the interception.

As to the Prism programme, it uses 45,000 selectors. We do not have the exact number of key words for the NSA's massive intrusion via Upstream on the wanadoo.fr address. The experts consulted by Le Monde consider that the methods of sorting are similar to those used by Prism and that the criteria retained by the NSA covers sectors considered to be ‘strategic' by the American government in the domains of security, politics and economics. In relation to the central role played by Alcatel-Lucent in matters of equipping communication networks, particularly submarine networks, access by the NSA to all the communications of the firm's employees might well be systematic. The philosophy of the NSA in matters of intelligence, according to the official declarations of its director, General Keith Alexander, is to be able to be warned in case of danger and to have a data base at their disposal, in case of need, which gives an idea of the timespan of stockage of the data thus intercepted.

Jacques Follorou et Glenn Greenwald(Journaliste)