France summons U.S. ambassador over spying report

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/21/us-france-nsa-idUSBRE99K04920131021

by stfu • 13 years ago

148 61 13 years ago

oelmekki3• 13 years ago

Le Monde's revelations that 70.3 million pieces of French telephone data were recorded by the NSA between Dec 10, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013

Fun fact about that : this number is actually bigger than french population (~ 66M).

jlengrand2• 13 years ago

Might still be possible, if you take the number of professional phones into account too. :)

oelmekki3• 13 years ago

Yep, I do not contest the number, it just gives a sense of the scale of this surveillance :)

Luc• 13 years ago

French phones can be used more than once though... 'Allo 'allo!

eis3• 13 years ago

"pieces of telephone data" is not very specific but it could mean "x called Y at T for D seconds". And it's over a period of nearly a month. Many people do phone calls at least once a day. So 70M records for a population of 66M is not unrealistic for widescale surveillance.

What the number makes clear though is that it can't be for targeted terrorism-suspect surveilance. Unless you have something like a million suspects in France.

And in any case they should ask the french authorities/spies for help if they want to know something about french residents.

I wonder how the USA would react if other governments started openly surveilling US citizens/companies/politicians. That'd be one fun thing to watch.

mercurial3• 13 years ago

To be faire, the "openly" part was entirely unfortunate as far as the NSA is concerned, they were really happy when "openly" was "secretly".

andyjohnson0• 13 years ago

I read oelmekki's comment as putting the number of monitored calls in context, not questioning its correctness.

hbbio• 13 years ago

It's pretty hilarious situation after France denied fly-zone to the Bolivian Presidential aircraft this summer when they "feared" that Snowden might be inside...

Voltaire said something like: "God, please protect me from my friends. I take care of my enemies."

mercurial3• 13 years ago

Yes, cry me a river. Supposedly "allied" governments have no qualms spying on each other, or engaging in "economic intelligence" for the military-industrial lobby. Would the French DGSE (or other western intelligence agencies) engage in large-scale surveillance of their own citizens, let alone foreigners, if they believed they could get away with it? You bet.

jbevain• 13 years ago

Would the French DGSE (or other western intelligence agencies) engage in large-scale surveillance of their own citizens

They most certainly do:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electron...

p4bl03• 13 years ago

They do. If you can read French, check out http://reflets.info/.

AJ007• 13 years ago

In an interview of Larry Ellison Charlie Rose this past summer, Larry described the French blatantly going through all his electronics when he traveled over there.

Disappointingly and not surprisingly he didn't have a problem with the allegations against the NSA.

Something to consider is that points of interest differ within governments. For example, fugitive Marc Rich was believed to have been aided by the US State Department even as the DOJ continuously attempted to kidnap him. In other countries you even end up with military coups when one group really is unhappy with another. On the other hand, there is a lot of noise making in countries with representative elections, which means little.

Edit: I would not be surprised if we start seeing criminal indictments against executives of US internet companies in some countries.

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

Same hypocrisy in Germany with Merkel preemptively and officially refusing Snowden any potential request for asylum, a few months back.

All this makes it so terribly obvious that Europe literally is not entitled to and can not have or grow a pair of balls anymore. Europe's role is pretty much reduced to hosting the military bases and NSA spying facilities of the US.

criley2• 13 years ago

Don't count Germany out. Merkel has preserved German strength at the cost of South Europe's pain. The Euro is managed to protect Northern economies, not mitigate the Southern pains. "Bailouts" and rescue plans are heavily biased towards preserving the North's separation from the fallout. All of this strengthens Germany and the northern countries at the expense of the EU as a whole.

As the worldwide balance of power continues to shift over the next decade or two, I believe Merkel's Germany is poised to be extremely relevant, even if it is so at the cost of the cohesion of the EU.

It also reaffirms to me why the UK seems to have very little interest joining the party like their neighbors. Why compete for first fiddle against a self-serving Merkel?

It'll be interesting times but I don't think it's as simple as Europe being relegated to America's extended states.

pgeorgi4• 13 years ago

With probably no place in Germany that's more than 250km away from an US/UK military base, and the "extraordinary rendition" program in mind, I'd also refuse asylum in Germany to someone who wants to flee the US.

Especially in a high profile case like Snowden's.

I guess a plane ticket to a non-NATO country through back channels might be better help for people seeking protection from the US than granting refugee status.

nikolak• 13 years ago

As far as I remember they said that Germany can't consider asylum request from Snowden if he isn't on German soil, according to the law, and if he gets there and files an asylum request they'll consider it.

I don't remember Merkel, or anyone else, saying that they won't even accept asylum request or that they'll refuse the request if it's made according to the law.

jbogp• 13 years ago

We should have stuck to our beloved Minitel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

gelnior5• 13 years ago

Frenches don't really worry about that, they are already building the next generation of personal cloud ;) http://cozy.io

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

First time I've seen cozy. Looks quite useful.

Create• 13 years ago

http://owncloud.org/

pgeorgi4• 13 years ago

I find it hard to take a security related project seriously that installs with:

$ curl http://cozy.io/install_cozy.sh | HOST=root@ip sh # sudoer required

Edit: even more annoying is that this script is only supposed to run on Debian/Ubuntu - so this script isn't even any more portable than .deb packages

Edit2 to be more constructive: would you accept contributions to build packages? Apart from this annoyance the project looks interesting!

gelnior5• 13 years ago

How do you install new stuff on your machine without super user rights ? Do you have a specific user to run apt-get ?

mikeash• 13 years ago

It would be fun to build a list of projects that install this way, then build a tool that sits on open WiFi networks and automatically tacks on a "fun" payload whenever it sees someone request one of these scripts.

gelnior5• 13 years ago

to be more constructive: would you accept contributions to build packages? Apart from this annoyance the project looks interesting!

Of course any contribution of this kind is greatly appreciated !

rtpg• 13 years ago

Slightly off topic, but what frustrates me about all this is that there is absolutely no outrage in France about the DGSE's absolutely heinous practices in this domain. Complete domestic surveillance without ANY legal framework whatsoever, not even some stage court like FISA court.

Sagat5• 13 years ago

There's a huge difference between being spied upon by your own government and being spied upon by some manifest-destiny-following foreigner.

Loughla2• 13 years ago

And that would be?

scott_karana2• 13 years ago

And what if, due to collaboration, they both spied on you together?

ajays• 13 years ago

To paraphrase a famous line: I'm shocked, shocked that there's spying going on!

Snark aside: what may have riled French feathers is the fact that NSA spied on politicians too. I bet they have lots of blackmail stuff.

gadders2• 13 years ago

Possibly given how French politicians behave...

Sagat5• 13 years ago

Please don't apply american fundamentalist puritan standards to everyone, please.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

The whole thing's just awkward. All of these agencies understand and know that this is going on. But when concrete evidence is given to the public they have to call in ambassador's and do this whole "this is terrible!" song and dance. Then it's back to normal.

harryf• 13 years ago

You do have love "trying to play it down" reporting like this though...

The NSA's targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, as well as those tied to French business or politics, Le Monde wrote.

...setting up the "we accidentally all your powerful people while hunting terrorists honest" defense.

p4bl03• 13 years ago

It would be quite ironic (but sadly, not impossible) if the technologies (like 0days, massive traffic analysis tools, DPI tools, etc.) used by the NSA to spy on France were some of the numerous that are sold to them by French companies like Vupen, Amesys, Qosmos…

walshemj• 13 years ago

French foreign minster "I'm shocked, shocked to find that spying is going on in here!"

NSA spook in black shades hands a usb stick to the Minister "your info on Angles strategy for the next eu summit"

French foreign minster (sote voce) "Oh, thank you very much."

France summons U.S. ambassador over spying report

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