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A daily summary of global reports on security issues.

Both the French and Mexican governments are demanding answers from the US regarding new reports that the National Security Agency has been conducting large-scale interceptions of French telecommunications and hacked the email of the last president of Mexico.

The French government summoned the US ambassador today to answer questions about a report in Le Monde that detailed the volume of NSA spying on French telecommunications in December 2012 and early January 2013 – which the French newspaper totaled at 70.3 million phone calls and text messages.

The US ambassador, Charles Rifkin, declined to comment on being summoned to the French ministry, Reuters adds, though he noted that French-US relations on military and intelligence issues were "the best [they've] been in a generation."

According to an English version of the report published on Le Monde's website, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show a pattern of high-volume, though apparently targeted, spying on French telecommunications. Le Monde writes:

Although the exact subjects of the intercepted messages are unknown, Le Monde writes that what information is available "leads us to think that the NSA targets concerned both people suspected of association with terrorist activities as well as people targeted simply because they belong to the worlds of business, politics or French state administration."

Le Monde adds that American authorities declined to comment on the report, but pointed the paper towards a June 8, 2013, document offered by US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that said foreign citizens could not be spied upon "without a valid foreign intelligence purpose."

In a separate article, Le Monde notes that almost all of the NSA's focus in France seems to be on two communications websites: wanadoo.fr and alcatel-lucent.fr. Orange and Alcatel-Lucent, the respective owners of the two sites, declined to comment on Le Monde's report.

Le Monde's revelations about the scope of NSA spying in France come on the heels of a report in Der Spiegel, published Sunday, that the US agency had also successfully hacked the email of former Mexican President Felipe Calderon while he was in office.

American journalist Glenn Greenwald and Brazilian broadcaster O Globo reported last month that both Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff had also been spied upon by the NSA.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Mexican government has demanded that the US investigate the spying, which Mexico calls "unacceptable, unlawful and contrary to Mexican law and international law." The Times also notes that: