Oct 21st 2013, 14:05, by Peter Sayer, IDG News Service
Fresh off Mexico's condemnation of NSA snooping, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius has summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on French telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent and gathered data on millions of phone calls.
Fabius, intercepted outside a meeting of the European Union Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg, told journalists that he immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador to the Foreign Ministry upon reading the news in French newspaper Le Monde.
Documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that in a period of just 30 days, the NSA recorded data relating to 70.3 million phone calls involving French citizens using a process called Dialed Number Recognition on equipment based in France, the newspaper reported. This equipment can be used to trigger the automatic recording of calls to certain numbers, and also to identify SMS messages of interest by keyword, the newspaper said.
French carrier networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent and a service operated by Orange, a French carrier, were also the subject of special attention from the NSA, according to other documents obtained by Snowden and seen by the newspaper. In addition to monitoring the communications and websites of companies such as Google and Facebook, the NSA's Prism program also monitored the domains alcatel-lucent.fr and wanadoo.fr, the newspaper said.
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