Le Monde exposes huge French spying programme

Days after French President Francois Hollande sternly told the US to stop spying on its allies, Le Monde newspaper disclosed a massive home-grown data collection programme, which sweeps up nearly all phone calls, e-mails and social media activity in and out of France.

Le Monde reported on Thursday that the General Directorate for External Security did the same kind of data collection as the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and the British GCHQ, but it did so without clear legal authority.

The government denied the report, but Le Monde stuck by its story yesterday, warning that "French Big Brother is Watching".

The system is run with "complete discretion, at the margins of legality and outside all serious control", the newspaper said, describing it as "a-legal". Data collected from telephone conversations, emails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter are then stored "for years" on a supercomputer where other security services can access them, it said.

The main interest of the agency, the paper said, was to trace who was talking to whom, when and from where and for how long, rather than on listening in to random conversations between individuals.

The revelation may temper French criticism when European security experts meet their US counterparts in Washington next week.