no.
they have sources and intelligence officers share information, for various reasons, not excluding political beliefs.
but spying the way USA was doing it on Merkel (for example) is not common, at all.
It would also mean that American intelligence is more incompetent than French or Italian intelligence, never caught spying an ally, which cast some doubts on why CIA is so highly praised...
I really don't believe it's true.
And frankly "former intelligence officer says that" it's more information warfare than something newsworthy.
If we believed "former intelligence officers" flying saucers should be filling our skies.
https://www.france24.com/en/20130702-france-usa-spying-snowd...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electro...
Beyond just spying, French intelligence services even blew up a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand. They don’t have a moral problem with messing with allies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warri...
Allies negotiate with each other all the time. Of course it helps them to have inside knowledge of what’s going on behind the scenes. Why do you think any country would handicap itself?
why do you think I think that?
As a person from Rome I have no respect for France.
The point is not that secret services spy on each other, but that mass surveillance of the scale US has built has no equivalent in the west.
They have been spying their citizen too.
Televisions, smartphones and even anti-virus software are all vulnerable to CIA hacking, according to the WikiLeaks documents released Tuesday. The capabilities described include recording the sounds, images and the private text messages of users, even when they resort to encrypted apps to communicate
Add to that most of the corporations amassing people data are American and manufacture the most popular devices around (not limited to but including clouds, voice assistants, even roomba now) and have close relations with NSA (they have to or are willing to do it it doesn't matter) and the only logical conclusion is that they either are incompetent and got caught or they have been doing it too aggressively and the allies got pissed. Right now I believe they simply stepped up their game and catching them is just gone be harder.
Wiretapping looks like child's play in comparison.
But in the end my comment was about the fact that EU Parliament is not the CIA and it's not advocating for mass surveillance.
There's a reason why secret services are called secret, because they are not doing it because the laws permits it.
Stop saying things you can't prove.
> French mass surveillance program in detail.
not remotely in detail and not remotely close to what we call mass surveillance and not remotely close to what NSA does
from the article (which I have to suppose you haven't read, because it's in the first paragraph)
The agency intercepted signals from computers and phones in France as well as between France and other countries, looking not so much at content but to create a map of "who is talking to whom", the paper said.
The metadata from phone and internet use was stocked in a "gigantic database" which could be consulted by six French intelligence and security agencies as well as the police.
NSA don't simply look for metadata, they can simply ask Face.. ehm Meta for that (WhatsApp).
They actually look closely at the content.
The article also goes on saying that France haven't protested much about Prism because they have (assumingly) the largest system in Europe, after the Brits (that come way after the US)
So not "multiple countries in Europe" but a couple countries have put in place system that rivals with WhatsApp abilities to collect metadata, but WhatsApp obtain it from willing users.
Imagine what MS, Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, Oracle, and many other american corporations can collect for the NSA while hiding those activities as legit businesses and what that means for NSA: being free to focus only on everything else.
“Allies” are only allies for reasons of national interest, not because they are genuinely friends, whatever that would mean between countries.
Of course, there’s still outrage when they get caught. Here, for example, is Germany being outraged that the US spied on them. [1] And here’s Germany spying on France [2]. But they all know it’s going on.
And here’s a good quote from French intelligence:
> “If Hollande was genuinely shocked by these allegations, that would mean he wasn’t aware that this kind of thing is normal,” he said. “But of course he is aware. Hollande has to satisfy the feelings of the general public by expressing some indignation, but the truth is all countries spy on their friends and the only limitation is the means at their disposal.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/31/europe/denmark-us-nsa-merkel-...
[2] https://www.france24.com/en/20151113-germany-spying-france-h...