The Élysée cited business confidentiality when it refused to provide Mediapart with correspondence between presidential advisors and Amazon, Google and others giants of the digital world dating from 2017. However, Mediapart pursued the matter and after a lengthy process the administrative court in Paris found in our favour and we now have access to these documents. Like the recent 'Uber Files' controversy, they show just how closely aligned the thinking and approach of these technological groups is with that of Macron and his entourage. And also like the Uber case, they reveal that a business lobbyist from one of the groups – in this case Amazon - took part in Emmanuel Macron's 2017 presidential campaign. Alexandre Léchenet reports.
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.
