thumb|300px|right|A DGSE site in Domme, Périgord "Frenchelon" is the nickname given to the signal intelligence system operated by France. The name is a reference to its Anglo-American counterpart ECHELON.
thumb|300px|right|A DGSE site in Domme, Périgord "Frenchelon" is the nickname given to the signal intelligence system operated by France. The name is a reference to its Anglo-American counterpart ECHELON.
== History == Its existence has never been officially acknowledged by French authorities, although numerous journalists, based on military information, have mentioned it, since the European Parliament investigated ECHELON and also its implications in counter-terrorism. The term was coined by Kenneth Cukier, an American journalist living in Paris, in a paper presented at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in 1999, and later in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal Europe edition.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).