'How the NSA
Spies on the French' (Le Monde, France)
"According to documents from the National Security Agency that have been obtained by Le Monde, the telephone communications of French citizens are, in fact, intercepted on a massive scale. ... These papers describe the techniques used to illegally capture secrets or simply the private lives of the French people. The documents provide sufficient information to surmise that the NSA's targets include both people with suspected links to terrorist activities, as well as those targeted simply for their places in business, politics or the French administration."
According to documents from the National
Security Agency (NSA) that have been obtained by Le Monde, the telephone communications
of French citizens are, in fact, intercepted on a massive scale. These papers,
revealed in June by a former consultant to the agency, Edward Snowden, describe
the techniques used to illegally capture secrets or simply the private lives of
the French people. Certain aspects of this have been touched on by the German
weekly Der Spiegel and British newspaper The Guardian. Others are new.
To learn
more about the context of Le Monde's revelations read the editorial: Fighting Big
Brother.
Among the thousands of documents the former NSA employee took with him is a graph that describes the
extent of the telephone surveillance carried out in France. It was found that
during a 30 day period, from December 10, 2012, to January 8, 2013, 70.3
million recordings of French citizens' telephone calls were performed by the NSA.
THE
THREE PARTIES
The agency has several collection methods. When
certain telephone numbers are used in France, they activate a signal that
automatically triggers the recording of certain conversations. This
surveillance also recovers SMS messages and their
contents using keywords. Finally, the NSA systematically stores the call
history of every target.
This espionage falls under the "US-985D"
program. Up to now, no precise explanation of the acronym has been provided, either
by the Snowden documents or former members of the NSA. By way of comparison,
the acronyms used by the NSA for the same type of interceptions in Germany are
"US-987LA" and "US-987LB." This series of numbers
corresponds to a circle categorized by the U.S. as the "third party,"
which includes France and Germany, as well as Austria, Poland and Belgium. The
"second party" concerns the English-speaking countries historically
close to Washington: the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, known by the moniker
"The Five Eyes."
The "first party" concerns the sixteen U.S. secret services.
The techniques used for these interceptions
appear under the code names "DRTBOX" and
"WHITEBOX." Their characteristics are not
understood, but we know that under the first code (DRTBOX),
the data from 62.5 million telephone records were collected in France between
December 10, 2012, and January 8, 2013. Under the second (WHITEBOX),
7.8 million items were recorded over the same period. The documents provide
sufficient information to surmise that the NSA's
targets include both people with suspected links to terrorist activities, as
well as those targeted simply for their places in business, politics or the French
administration.
Click Graphic for Interactive Version
The NSA graph shows an average of 3 million
data intercepts per day, with peaks of almost 7 million on December 24, 2012
and January 7, 2013. But from December 28 to 31, no interceptions seem to
have occurred. This apparent cessation of activity could be explained by
the time required, in late December 2012, for the U.S. Congress to renew Section
702 of the law governing wire-tapping abroad. Similarly, nothing happened
on the 3, 5 or 6 of January, 2013, although this time, no plausible reason has
been advanced. Many questions remain, starting with the precise identity of the
targets and the justifications for such a large-scale collection of data on
foreign territory against a sovereign ally.
When asked, American authorities didn't wish to
comment on the documents, which they consider "classified." Nevertheless,
they referred to a statement made June 8 by U.S. Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper: "For those targeted outside our frontiers, we
cannot go after them without legally valid grounds, such as a terrorist threat,
hostile cyber activity or nuclear proliferation." [translated quote].
UNIVERSAL
INFORMANT
France is not the country in which the NSA intercepts the most digital or telephone connections.
The "Boundless
Informant" system, revealed in June by Edward Snowden through the Guardian, gives an overview of
information gathered by the NSA's various
wire-tapping systems in real time from around the world. "Boundless
Informant" collects not only telephone data (DNR
- Digital Number Recognition), but also data from digital networks (DNI -
Digital Network Intelligence).
One of the documents, which Le Monde has been able to consult, notes
that between February 8 and March 8, the NSA
collected 124.8 billion DNR and 97.1 billion DNI items from across the world,
including, of course, war zones like Afghanistan, as well as Russia and China. In
Europe, only Germany and the United Kingdom exceeded France in terms of the number
of interceptions. For the British, however, this was done with the consent of
their government.
