France's Le Monde newspaper released a disclosure of government-backed surveillance programs on Thursday that is being compared to PRISM, the agency Edward Snowden revealed as a United States-supported intelligence venture.
Without citing any sources, Le Monde said that the nation's Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE)-a foreign intelligence agency, according to the Associated Press-habitually mines through information from civilian computers and telephones in France, in addition to data from abroad.
According to Le Monde, information on "all e-mails, SMSs, telephone calls, Facebook and Twitter posts" are assembled and shoved into an enormous three-story underground shelter at DGSE center of operations in Paris.
Le Monde made a point to stress that the metadata-logistical information including when the call was made and where a person was located upon sending an email-was saved, not the content.
The paper claimed that France's seven other intelligence groups-among them, domestic secret services-can access this data.
They said the operation was performed "outside the law, and beyond any proper supervision."
The French national security commission defended this program, saying that the surveillance is completely legal, and that the information is meant to anticipate attacks and security breaches.
DGSE was not available for comment from many news outlets.
The paper compared DGSE's program to PRISM, saying that the U.S. spy venture was used to take information from Silicon Valley firms' servers, while the French operation seems to feed on intercepting electronic data moving around the globe.
Three days before Le Monde revealed this agency, President Obama insisted that spying was neither a novel practice, nor merely an American one.
"I guarantee you that in European capitals, there are people who are interested in, if not what I had for breakfast, at least what my talking points might be should I end up meeting with their leaders," the President said during a press conference in Tanzania. "That is how intelligence services operate."
