The White House conceded on Monday that revelations about how its intelligence agencies have intercepted enormous amounts of French phone traffic raised "legitimate questions for our friends and allies".
In a statement released after a phone call between Barack Obama and his counterpart, François Hollande, the White House made one of its strongest admissions yet about the diplomatic impact of the disclosures by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The French government had earlier summoned the US ambassador in Paris on Monday to demand an urgent explanation over claims that the National Security Agency had engaged in widespread phone and internet surveillance of French citizens.
The French daily Le Monde published details from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, suggesting the NSA had been intercepting French phone traffic on what it termed "a massive scale".
"The president and President Hollande discussed recent disclosures in the press – some of which have distorted our activities, and some of which raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed," the White House said in a statement.
"The president made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share. The two presidents agreed that we should continue to discuss these issues in diplomatic channels."
Le Monde said more than 70m French phone calls had been recorded in one 30-day period late last year. Techniques included the automatic recording of conversations from certain numbers, and sweeping up text messages based on keywords. Le Monde warned that the interceptions were likely to have targeted not just those with suspected terrorist links but also people in business and politics.
Earlier on Monday, the French government summoned the US ambassador in Paris, Charles Rivkin. A French official said Rivkin was met by the foreign ministry's chief of staff, who reminded the US "that these types of practices between partners are totally unacceptable, and we must be assured that they are no longer happening". The French demanded that Washington provide a full explanation "and a tangible response to our concerns as soon as possible".
The French prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said he was shocked, and demanded the US provide "clear answers, justifying the reasons these practices were used, and above all creating the conditions of transparency so these practices can be put to an end".
Before Obama's call, the White House responded to the claims in Le Monde by saying that the US "gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations".
Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council at the White House, said: "We've begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share."
The French foreign minister Laurent Fabius held talks with US secretary of state John Kerry early on Tuesday morning about Syria, but also raised the issue of the NSA's mass surveillance of French
citizens.
A French official said Fabius used the meeting to reiterate Paris's "demands for an explanation over spying practises that are unacceptable between partners and which must stop."
On Monday night, Kerry said Washington would continue "bilateral consultations" with France, one of "our oldest allies", to address the question of reports of the US government "gathering information from
some of the agencies".
He said: "Protecting the security of our citizens in today's world is a very complicated, very challenging task, it is an everyday 24-7, 365-day task, unfortunately, because there are lots of people out there seeking to do harm to other people." He added: "Our goal is always to try to find the right balance between protecting the security and the privacy of our citizens."
Prior to the meeting, Fabius had warned: "This sort of practice between partners that invades privacy is totally unacceptable, and we have to make sure, very quickly, that this no longer happens."
Fabius added: "We co-operate in a useful way in the fight against terrorism, but that does not justify everything."
The reports in Le Monde, which were co-written by the outgoing Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald – who worked with Snowden to lay bare the extent of the NSA's actions – claimed that the NSA recorded 70.3m phone calls in France between 10 December 2012 and 8 January 2013
According to the paper, the documents show that the NSA was allegedly targeting not only terrorist suspects but also politicians, businesspeople and members of the administration under a programme codenamed US-985D. The paper said "French interests" were "targeted on a daily basis".
Le Monde highlighted what it called "techniques used to violate the secrets or simply the private life of French people". The paper said: "The agency has several collection methods. When certain French phone numbers are dialled, a signal is activated that triggers the automatic recording of certain conversations. This surveillance also recovered SMS and content based on keywords."
Such methods, it added, allowed the NSA to keep a systematic record of the history of each target's connections. Le Monde said the unpublished Snowden documents it had seen showed "intrusion, on a vast scale, both into the private space of French citizens as well as into the secrets of major national firms".
The most recent documents cited by Le Monde, dated April 2013, indicated the NSA's interest in email addresses linked to Wanadoo, once part of France Telecom. About 4.5 million people still use wanadoo.fr email addresses in France. Also targeted was Alcatel-Lucent, a French-American telecoms company that employs more than 70,000 people and works in the sensitive sector of equipping communication networks.
One of the documents instructed analysts to draw not only from the electronic surveillance programme, but also from another initiative dubbed Upstream, which allows surveillance on undersea communications cables.
Le Monde said one document it consulted showed that between 8 February and 8 March 2013 the NSA collected, worldwide, 124.8bn telephone data items and 97.1bn computer data items. In Europe, only Germany and the UK exceeded France in terms of the numbers of interceptions.
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