So, the French have a digital panopticon too:
France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.
The data is stored on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the DGSE intelligence service, the paper says.
The operation is "outside the law, and beyond any proper supervision", Le Monde says.
And this isn't just an abstract thing - they're spying on us as well as their own citizens.
But the real problem is that its another country we thought was a modern democracy which actually turns out to be a totalitarian surveillance state. Apparently the only difference between "the west" and the Stasi now is that we have better technology and are a little more secretive about it.
