Documents seen by French daily Le Monde say the US intelligence agency, the NSA, obtained over 70 million telephone records of French citizens within a 30-day period.
The American spy dragnet took place between 10 December 2012 and 8 January 2013, reports Le Monde on Monday (21 October).
The paper says certain key words, detected by the NSA system, would launch an automatic recording of the telephone conversation. Text messages were also hoovered up.
The NSA programme is cal...
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Nikolaj joined EUobserver in 2012 and covers home affairs. He is originally from Denmark, but spent much of his life in France and in Belgium. He was awarded the King Baudouin Foundation grant for investigative journalism in 2010.