Après avoir passé près de 13 ans au Nouvel Observateur, j'ai rejoint Mediapart en novembre 2012. Je suis en charge des sujets liés aux libertés publiques.
Declaration of interest
In the interest of transparency towards its readers, Mediapart’s journalists fill out and make public since 2018 a declaration of interests on the model of the one filled out by members of parliament and senior civil servants with the High Authority for Transparency and Public Life (HATVP), a body created in 2014 after Mediapart’s revelations on the Cahuzac affair.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone features on a list of interception targets on a database of the US National Security Agency (NSA), Mediapart can reveal. In an investigation mounted with whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Mediapart details here how more than 50 phone numbers within the German chancellery, including voice and fax landlines into Merkel’s office and those of her senior staff, were for years the target of interceptions by the NSA. The revelations come just one month after German prosecutors dropped an investigation into earlier claims that the NSA tapped Merkel’s mobile due to what they said was a lack of evidence. Jérôme Hourdeaux and Mathieu Magnaudeix, in collaboration with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, report.
In an open letter to the French president on Friday the founder of WikiLeaks, Julain Assange, made an apparent appeal for political asylum in France. Assange, whose whistleblowing organisation was behind the recent revelations published by Mediapart and Libération about US spying on French heads of state, said that he faced “political persecution” and that his life was “in danger”. However, within an hour of the publication of the open letter President Hollande's office issued a brusque statement rejecting asylum for Assange, who has spent three years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to escape extradition to Sweden. As Lénaïg Bredoux, Jérôme Hourdeaux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report, the episode quickly stirred up a row and will inevitably reignite the debate about how far France should be prepared to go in welcoming whistleblowers such as Assange and the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden.
The United States is conducting widespread economic and industrial espionage against France, including eavesdropping on at least two economy ministers, Mediapart can reveal, as part of its investigation carried out with Libération and WikiLeaks. The ministers concerned were François Baroin, who served under President Nicolas Sarkozy, and his socialist successor Pierre Moscovici, who is now a European Commissioner. But the top secret documents also show that the US National Security Agency has routinely spied not just on politicians and government officials but also French businesses seeking to win contracts abroad. The aim seems to have been to undermine the effectiveness and competitiveness of French companies competing for business on the world market. Fabrice Arfi, Lénaïg Bredoux, Martine Orange, Jérôme Hourdeaux and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange report on the latest disclosures.
The United States has eavesdropped on at least three French presidents and a whole raft of senior officials and politicians in France for at least six years, according to secret documents obtained by WikiLeaks and revealed here by Mediapart. The top secret reports from America's National Security Agency (NSA) show that the phones of presidents François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac were all tapped. But they also show that the espionage carried out on a supposedly key ally of Washington's went even further and deeper, and that senior diplomats, top civil servants and politicians also routinely had their phones tapped. The documents seen by Mediapart reveal proof of the spying on the French state that took place from 2006 to 2012 but there is no reason to suggest that this espionage did not start before 2006 and has not continued since. The revelations are certain to spark a major diplomatic row and highlight once again the uncontrolled and aggressive nature of American spying on friends and foes alike, as first revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Mediapart's Fabrice Arfi and Jérôme Hourdeaux and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks report.
Within hours of the revelation last week that a planned armed attack on churches near Paris had been foiled, President François Hollande and prime minister Manuel Valls publicly asserted that it underlined the need for the French government’s proposed new surveillance and intelligence law. This deeply-controversial bill, which gives wide-ranging powers to intelligences services to watch over the population, is currently going through the National Assembly, with a crucial vote due on May 5th. Yet an analysis of the case of arrested student Sid Ahmed Ghlam, who is said to have been planning the assault on two churches at Villejuif near Paris, raises doubts over whether the new powers in the bill would have made any difference. It emerged that Ghlam, who was placed under formal investigation on Friday for terrorist offences, was already known to the security services. Moreover, he had twice been questioned – the second occasion was in February this year – but released each time because officials apparently considered that he did not pose a serious enough risk. Some experts say the authorities should spend more time on prioritising which suspects to watch rather than on seeking new surveillance powers. Jérôme Hourdeaux and Louise Fessard report.
The French Parliament this week formally adopted a new anti-terrorism law, part of which aims to stop terrorists using the internet to attract recruits and plot attacks. It will allow the authorities to block websites that “condone terrorism” and will create a new offence of “individual terrorist enterprise”. One key objective is to stop the “preparation” of attacks via the web. The government, which has rushed these measures through, says they are needed to combat the growing use of the internet and social media by terror groups and in particular to tackle the threat of so-called “lone wolf” terrorists operating in France and elsewhere. But civil liberties groups, judges and the state body that oversees the impact of digital technology have condemned the law as an attack on freedom, ineffective and unworkable. Jérôme Hourdeaux details the new measures.
French IT firm Qosmos, specialised in mass-surveillance technology and which works on projects for France's intelligence services, is the subject of a judicial investigation launched in April into ‘complicity in acts of torture’. The probe centres on the Paris-based company’s involvement in a contract, led by an Italian company, to supply the Bashar al-Assad regime in war-torn Syria with a system to intercept, open and archive almost all email and other internet traffic flowing through the country. Qosmos says it eventually withdrew from the project for ethical reasons, when the key technology it provided for the project was not yet operational. But, as detailed in this joint report by Mediapart and Reflets.info, the history of the case raises more questions than it provides answers.
The hacker, IT specialist and journalist Olivier Laurelli has been ordered to pay a 3,000-euro fine for downloading files from a government agency that he found by chance during a routine internet search. The court of appeal in Paris ruled he was guilty of 'theft' and fraudulently remaining inside an unauthorised computer system. Apart from the disturbing implications for all journalists and internet users of the verdict, the court case also highlights the worrying lack of knowledge among judges who appeared not to know what 'Google' or 'login' were. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
President Barack Obama last week announced the introduction of curbs on the use made by US intelligence agencies of communications data they have collected from private individuals, government leaders and organisations around the world. Obama’s move was denounced by civil rights defenders as a weak and minimal response to the unbridled mass espionage practices of the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed to the media by its former contractor Edward Snowden. Among the most startling of these was the recent revelation that the NSA had successfully infiltrated a submarine civil communications cable that runs from France to the Far East, in which it planted a virtually undetectable parallel network to spy on the traffic that passes through it. French telecoms giant Orange, part of the consortium that uses the cable, has told Mediapart it will this month file legal action over the hacking, opening the path for a judicial investigation that could have major political and diplomatic consequences. As Jérôme Hourdeaux reports, the technique used by the NSA to attack the cable is one of the most fearsome mass espionage systems yet uncovered.
A hacker using elementary computer equipment and what he described as “a few bits of knowledge that everyone is capable of finding on the internet” has succeeded in accessing confidential emails and personal files of Members of the European Parliament, their assistants and even the institution’s IT experts, Mediapart can reveal. The operation was, he said, mounted as a demonstration of the vulnerability of security at both the parliament in Strasbourg and also among many national administrations which use software, notably that of Microsoft, that experts have for years warned is exposed to espionage manipulations through fundamental - and what some suggest are possibly deliberate - flaws. While the scandal of mass surveillance employed by the US National Security Agency continues to unfold, Jérôme Hourdeaux reports on how major public institutions like the European Parliament continue to expose themselves to almost mundane intrusion of confidential data.
This article has been censored
A ruling by the Versailles court of appeal on July 4th 2013 has ordered that Mediapart must remove from its website all articles which contain extracts from the so-called ‘butler tapes’ at the heart of the Bettencourt affair. The penalty for not doing so is 10,000 euros per article per day (effective from July 21st). Mediapart has appealed against the ruling.
France is set to become the 14th country worldwide - and the ninth in Europe - to open up marriage to homosexual couples after its parliament on Tuesday voted in favour of a bill of law to give marriage and adoption rights to couples of the same sex. It now remains for the socialist government to enact the law, while a group of conservative opposition MPs, whose UMP party has campaigned against the bill, have promised to contest it before France’s Constitutional Council. The vote on an issue that has divided public opinion comes after six months of demonstrations for and against amid sometimes hysterical rhetoric from politicians. Mediapart reporters joined separate rallies in Paris held by opponents and supporters of the marriage reform. The opinions expressed reveal apparently irreconcilable views over the issue, while many gays spoke of their indignation and fear over the upsurge in insults and violence they have personally witnessed since last autumn.
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Le mois dernier, se tenait à Berlin la conférence annuelle de la Berliner Gazette intitulée « TACIT FUTURES ». Durant trois jours, journalistes, codeurs, hacktivistes, artistes… étaient invités à travailler sur les concepts de mouvement, de flux à la fois de personnes de biens ou d’argent, à l’heure du big data et des algorithmes prédictifs.
Comme chaque année, plusieurs associations de différents pays, ont fêté le 1er janvier la « Journée du domaine public », célébrant l’entrée dans le domaine public d’œuvres incontournables qui se trouvent, à cette date, libérées de leur législation nationale sur les droits d’auteur.
