espionnage

The leaked transcripts and reports on the phone taps carried out by the National Security Agency on three French presidents concern the current head of state, socialist François Hollande, and his right-wing predecessors Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. The documents obtained by WikiLeaks and revealed here by Mediapart reveal the different priorities at the time of the three French heads of state, as well as their different styles. Hollande and his then-prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, were discussing the Greek crisis, Sarkozy hoped to save the world from the financial crisis and Jacques Chirac was handing out detailed orders to his foreign minister. Lénaïg Bredoux and Ellen Salvi from Mediapart and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks report on what the presidents said.

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.