NSA Intercepted French Telephone Calls "On a Massive Scale"

rtoz writes "The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting French telephone calls 'on a massive scale,' according to a report published in Le Monde. According to Le Monde, the NSA recorded millions of telephone calls placed by French citizens over a 30-day period last year, including some placed by people with no connections to terrorist organizations. France called in the U.S. ambassador to protest the alleged large-scale spying on French citizens by NSA."

Re:Realities

[schneidafunk]

Friendly? France is well known for its industrial espionage [france24.com].

Re:Muslims

[rubycodez]

Hitler was not an atheist. He was a Roman Catholic, and had agreements and treaties with the Vatican

Did you read the article ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a blatant general accusation without evidence.

Re:Muslims

[pscottdv]

Worst? Depends on definition.

Ahead in the numbers? Yes.

http://www.examiner.com/article/atheist-vs-christian-whose-killed-more-and-who-will-survive [examiner.com]

Re:Who. Fucking. Cares.

[CrimsonAvenger]

It's their job to a) not blanket-grab millions of phone users of data in a random bug hunt but to apply "intelligence" and b) not to get caught doing so.

Actually, NSA's mandate is Signals Intelligence. Which pretty much means grabbing everything they can, then sorting it for utility.

Also, "intelligence" in the context of an intelligence agency (NSA, GCHQ, etc) has NOTHING to do with common usage of the word - it means the information they are gathering, or trying to.

However, on a similar note, if you found out that the French authorities had a complete copy of your phone records which got publicly leaked (WikiLeaks-style, say), would you not be pissed?

Surely would. However, absent me being a French citizen, it would never occur to me to scream "The French did something illegal!!!!", since FOREIGN intelligence gathering isn't illegal for any country.

Unless, of course, the actual intelligence gatherers are caught in the act of foreign soil. No, finding out they did it a year or two after the fact, with no names of the people doing the actual work, doesn't leave you much room for even a show trial, though "Viewing with Alarm" might be something you'd do to pacify your population when it is revealed that you can't protect your own people from foreign spying.

Which last seems to be what the French are trying for.

Just how much co-operation do you think you will see next time you're trying to track a terrorist cell through France?

I would never expect ANY cooperation from the French in regards to terrorism. The only interest they have is that it not be done against French citizens or businesses. They don't give a rat's ass about any other terrorism....

Re:Asking for their statue back?

[TubeSteak]

So will the french demand the return of the Statue of Liberty that they gifted to the americans?

The intellectual father of the Statue (Laboulaye) and the designer (Bartholdi) both felt that the United States better embodied the spirit of liberte, egalite, fraternite than Napoleon's empire.

Which is why the Statue of Liberty was installed in the USA, facing France, as a big middle finger to Napoleon III.
(Even though Napoleon was long gone by the time the Statue was finished.)