A Frenchman who broke into Barack Obama and Britney Spears' Twitter feeds insisted Thursday he is no hacker but a "kind pirate" seeking to expose security weaknesses.

"I did not act with a destructive aim ... I wanted to warn them, to show up the faults in the system," said the 23-year-old, who was arrested Tuesday after an operation by French police and FBI agents.

The curly-haired unemployed computer technician wore a pair of slippers adorned with smiley faces as he sat in his parents' home in central France and told of how he broke into the popular micro-blogging site.

Francois C., who spoke to AFP on condition that his full surname not be used, is accused of breaking into Twitter and Google accounts, including ones used by US president Obama and pop star Spears.

He has been bailed and is due to appear in court on June 24 and faces up to two years in jail if convicted of hacking into a database.

Francois took the name "Hacker Croll" from a figure in the Pacman video game he loved as a child and used it as an online pseudonym to brag about attacks on Twitter, which lets users send out messages of up to 140 characters.

In order to break into Twitter he said got access to the mailboxes of the company's employees by "guessing their passwords" or figuring them out by studying their Facebook pages, blogs or other websites.

In April last year he finally cracked the site's administrator codes and then got into the accounts of people like Obama and make screen captures which he posted on chat forums, he said.

"Everyone thought it was a joke until Twitter complained," he said.

Francois, the eldest of six children, lives with his parents in their modest home in Beaumont, a small town of 12,000 people near Clermont-Ferrand, the city where he will go on trial in June.

His mother told AFP that her son had "always been very introverted."

"I don't know anything about computers," she said. "I knew he spent a lot of time on his computer but I never thought it would end like this."

Francois said he does not go out much and spends up to 10 hours a day surfing the web. "It's my only passion," he said.

His father gave him his first computer when he was eight. He got into video games and then started exploring the Internet when he was 14, he said.

He attacked Twitter simply to show "that big companies are no more secure than any internet user. That's the message I wanted to get across."

"I am not a hacker. I am a kind pirate," said Francois, who did a computer technician course last year but has been unable to find a job.

Local prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat agreed. "He is not a hacker in the classic sense. He entered a house whose door had been left open."

This is not the first time Francois has been in trouble with the law. Last year he was given a suspended eight-month prison sentence and a small fine for gambling online with money that did not belong to him, police said.

San Francisco-based Twitter did not immediately reply to an email from AFP about his arrest while the FBI said it was looking into the report.

In July, leading US technology blog TechCrunch.com reported it had received a file containing 310 confidential corporate and personal documents from "Hacker Croll" about Twitter and the firm's employees.

TechCrunch said the documents included minutes of executive meetings, partnership agreements, financial projections, calendars, phone logs, office plans and other information. The blog published some of the documents.

Twitter founder Evan Williams confirmed to TechCrunch at the time that documents had been obtained, but insisted the hacker did not gain access to any Twitter user accounts.