French weekly magazines review

Read the cover stories of this week’s magazines and you will understand the full scope of French outrage following Edward Snowden’s revelation that Big Brother America has been watching not just her many enemies around the world but also her friends.

Le Figaro Magazine says America has been spying on us, with the giants of the Internet at the heart of the scandal. “The United States, our best spies”, according to Le Point. Le Nouvel Observateur calls it "The Large Ears Scandal", while it's “Small murders among Atlantic friends”, according to L’Express.

For its part, Le Canard Enchaîné satirises the large ears and big eyes of American President Barack Obama. According to the satirical weekly, Obama is giggling about the fuss the Europeans are making of the affair, after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of alleged spying at EU missions in Washington, New York and even at the EU headquarters in Brussels.

Le Point reports that the operations, code-named “blackfoot” and “Wabash”, had the trappings of the James Bond thriller: “The spy who loved me”. According to the journal, the US National Security Agency, NSA, intercepted 500 million telephone and Internet connections in Germany every month and two million conversations in France every single day.

Le Canard Enchaîné says Obama remains unruffled, despite being caught red-handed in the posture of a “vulgar plumber”. The satirical weekly also looks beyond the European paranoia, regretting that the EU leaders couldn’t even agree to grant asylum to the whistleblower stranded at a Moscow airport. For the journal, Barack Obama doesn’t need the NSA’s large ears to understand the limits of the Europeans' indignation. They also run spy programs of their own and depend on intelligence collected by the Americans, according to Le Canard.

L’Express argues in an editorial that Europe has actually become easy prey in the international “economic cold war” waged on the Internet by governments and businesses for control of hundreds of millions of consumers across the planet.

As Europe remains locked in the spying controversy with its American ally, Le Point says China is fortifying its position as the world’s largest e-commercial platform with 700 million Chinese (almost half of the country’s people) using the web in 2013. That’s more than twice the population of the United States, according to Le Point.

The journal says that US internet giants such as Ebay, Amazon, YouTube and Google all operate in China, which have helped the hosts develop intelligence utilities of their own. An example raised by Le Point is the recent invention of a facial-recognition application capable of determining which film star you resemble. Also due in the markets very soon is a new Chinese application known as “Momo”, which can help you identify compatible dating partners.

You can learn more about the so-called dark face of the World Wide Web in this week’s Le Nouvel Observateur, how it has become a kind of Bermuda triangle for millions of criminals, drug and arms traffickers, computer pirates, hackers, dissidents, and Jihadists.

The left-leaning journal says experts have nicknamed the internet the “deep web”. It’s not the Internet we know but a parallel network where reprehensible activities prosper, to the chagrin of police and web security experts immersed in the abyss of cyber criminality, according to Le Nouvel Observateur.