General Alexander: French Spying Reports Are ‘Completely False’

General Keith Alexander said reports, based on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, that the National Security Agency gathered phone calls of French citizens were ”completely false” at Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing. “To be perfectly clear: This is not information we collected on European citizens,” he said. “Both [the newspaper, l’Espresso] and the person who stole the classified data did not understand what they were looking at.”

The NSA chief said that European media misread or didn’t understand the tool that they cited to make the claims they did about the NSA’s supposed actions, explaining that the relevant data was gathered by a foreign intelligence agency or the NSA in a joint NATO operation.