'Frenchelon': The French Echelon
It is legal in France for counterespionage agencies to intercept all communications of its citizens
- G-fs
PARIS - These services intercept millions of telephone calls, fax, email every day in search of political, military, and industrial information. Using a system that is very similar to Echelon, the global network operated largely by Americans and the object of inquiry from part of the European Parliament.
According to Nouvel Observateur [newspaper], the French Dgse [counterespionage] do not have the means of the American NSA and much less manpower (1.600 against 38,000). In spite of this, the agents of the services can intercept a good part of the communications that pass through satellites, not only Oltralpe [?], but nearly the entire planet.
The Anglo Saxons [America, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand] call it "Frenchelon" and its origins stem from a intelligence base at Domme, in the Périgord, opened in 1974 in order to intercept general communications via radio. But the creation of a system similar to that of America's Echelon goes back to the the mid-1980s, when it was decided to form two new centers of listening stations: one in French Guyana, near the space center of Kourou, the other in the Indian Ocean, on the island of Mayotte. Both are managed with the Bnd, the German counterespionage. A fourth center has been created near Paris, another in the south of the country and New Caledonia.
Now, the French are in a position to gather intelligence from nearly all communications carried out around the world, with the exception of northern Siberia and part of the Pacific.
• Translated & excerpted from a story originally published by •
la Repubblica, Rome / Italy | Giampiero Martinotti- April 6 2001
