Fresh revelations that the National Security Agency in the United States has been busy spying on a number of French presidents has prompted speculation that a new Edward Snowden has been leaking information – and an investigation is now under way to try and ferret out the suspected whistleblower. 

The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks acquired classified documents showing that the NSA carried out surveillance on three successive French presidents from 2006 until nearly the middle of 2012 – the current president, Francois Hollande and his two predecessors, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. 

The claims prompted a furious reaction from the French authorities, saying it was "unacceptable", but President Hollande was assured by President Barack Obama that the NSA was no longer spying on French leaders. WikiLeaks did not disclose the source of the classified material it obtained and said there would be "more timely and important revelations in the near future".

Calling its disclosure of the spying programme "Espionnage Élysée", WikiLeaks said that along with the trio of French leaders, the NSA also listened in on the conversations of French cabinet ministers and the French ambassador to the US. Among the topics that were discussed by the officials were the ongoing Greek economic crisis and its possible effects on the European Union as well as a range of international issues that France was concerned about. The global financial crisis was another hot topic, and then-president Sarkozy was recorded in the documents as saying that he alone could solve it. 

Previous revelations that the NSA had been spying on members of the German government also sparked outrage, as did Snowden’s disclosure to the media of the controversial agency’s mass surveillance of ordinary Americans’ phone conversations and internet activity, at least some of which has now been ruled illegal and stopped by lawmakers. 

Investigators in the US and Europe are currently conducting an investigation to try and find out how WikiLeaks got hold of the sensitive NSA documents, and in particular if someone in a position like former intelligence contractor Snowden supplied them to the whistleblowing website. WikiLeaks came to global prominence with its mass publishing in 2010 of US intelligence cables centred around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.