While Americans were celebrating the July Fourth holiday, French newspaper Le Monde was busy stirring up controversy across the Atlantic with news that the French security services are involved in NSA-style tapping of Internet and phone communications, text messages, and faxes. They have been successful enough that most electronic communications in France are now vacuumed up by the direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), which warehouses them in servers occupying three floors of the DGSE's Parisian headquarters.

The focus is on metadata, not content, and as with the NSA, is apparently used to graph webs of connection between groups and individuals. Should useful patterns emerge, intelligence operatives can seek "more intrusive techniques, like wire-tapping or police tails."

Le Monde argues that the system is "perfectly illegal"—or at least extra-legal in the sense that nothing like it had ever been anticipated under intelligence laws passed in the early 1990s. The DGSE data is also not tightly compartmentalized—six other French intelligence agencies can make requests for database searches, used for everything from customs to money-laundering. But the stated goal of the system is—surprise!—terrorism. From Le Monde:

This system is obviously of great value in the fight against terrorism. But it allows spying on anyone, any time. The DGSE collects billions of billions of units of data, which are compressed and stored on three floors in the basement of the DGSE headquarters on Boulevard Mortier in Paris... France is said to be among the Top 5 in computing capacity, after the United States, Britain, Israel and China. [DGSE technical director] Mr. [Bernard] Barbier estimated the number of connections picked up by the system at 4 billion in 2013, with a flow of about 1 billion simultaneous communications. "Today, our targets are the networks of the public at large," the director said at the time, "because they are used by terrorists."

Surveillance in France is supposed to be narrowly targeted, but just as in the US, the security services argue that "metadata" doesn't actually amount to personal surveillance and that it can be conducted with far less oversight. As a former intelligence agency head told the newspaper, "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."

Today, Le Monde followed up with responses from government officials. Jean-Jacques Urvoas, the MP who heads the Judiciary Committee in the French National Assembly, criticized the paper's reporting as not corresponding "to reality." But he offered few details, saying only that French citizens are "not subject to a massive and permanent espionage regime that is out of control."