French Summon US Ambassador Over Spying Claims

Chris Carrington
Activist Post

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has summoned the US ambassador over newspaper claims that the US spied on millions of phone calls in France.

La Monde, a French daily newspaper, has said that the interception of calls was triggered by keywords in the conversations. It states over 70 million calls were spied on and that emails and text messages also came under scrutiny. The massive amount of data was collected in just 30 days, between December 10 2012 and January 12 2013, according to the newspaper.

There was no mention of the current status of the operation codenamed US-985D (source)

Reuters reports:

“I have immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador, and he will be received this morning at the Quai d’Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry),” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Luxembourg…”If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that’s totally unacceptable,” Valls told Europe 1 radio. 

U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin declined immediate comment on reports that he had been called in by the French foreign ministry but stressed that U.S.-French ties were close. 

“This relationship on a military, intelligence, special forces … level is the best it’s been in a generation,” Rivkin told Reuters as Kerry arrived in Paris. 

In July, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary inquiries into the NSA’s programme, known as Prism, after Germany‘s Der Spiegel and Britain’s The Guardian revealed wide-scale spying by the agency leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. 

“We were warned in June (about the programme) and we reacted strongly but obviously we need to go further,” Fabius said. “We must quickly assure that these practices aren’t repeated.”

Last year the French said they had discovered a ‘worm’ in the computers of their Elysee network. They allege that this enabled data collection and screen shots to be taken at will, as well as microphone activation enabling conversations to be recorded.

The United states denied emphatically that they had been involved in any form of cyber ‘attack’ against the French government.

Chris Carrington is a writer, researcher and lecturer with a background in science, technology and environmental studies. Chris is an editor for The Daily Sheeple, where this first appeared. Wake the flock up!