French intelligence agency gets complete access to Orange Telecom Data
Another leak from Edward Snowden files, but this time not about the NSA, rather the documents revealed that France's central intelligence agency, the DGSE has complete and unconditional access to all of telecom giant Orange's data, not just metadata.

Yes! It is the same Orange company who threatened to sue the NSA for hacking into the underwater cable that it jointly owns with 15 other companies.
Cybersecurity

According to the French paper Le Monde -- Orange, the leading telecom company in France with more than 26 million customers worldwide cooperated allegedly illegally for years with France's main intelligence agency. DGSE and Agents with military clearance have been working with Orange for at least 30 years.

France has a PRISM like surveillance program to target phone communications, emails and data from tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. Furthermore, DGSE is also sharing this data with foreign allies like GCHQ.

The revelations come just one week after the exposure of the wiretap scandal of French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy phone calls.

The Company spokesperson said, they are cooperating the France Intelligence agency under strict compliance with the law and under the responsibility of the state and legal control of judges.

Orange CEO Stéphane Richard said that he wasn't aware of what the DGSE was doing. He just granted access to Orange for employees of the DGSE in order to comply with the law.

The French government owns a 27 percent stake in the company, but is that mean the country's secret services have legislative approval to access customer data?

Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.