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Hacked Macron Emails Dumped on Eve of French Election
An election draws near, and thousands of campaign emails are dumped online. Sound familiar?
This time the victim is French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron whose En Marche! Movement was apparently hacked less than two days before French voters decide between him and Marine Le Pen. Nine gigabytes of data were posted anonymously to document-sharing site Pastebin. Macron’s campaign confirmed the breach:
“The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to the diffusion on social media of various internal information,” the statement said.
An interior ministry official declined to comment, citing French rules which forbid any commentary liable to influence an election, and which took effect at midnight French time on Friday (2200 GMT).
That last bit creates a problem for Macron. According to French law, politicians, journalists, and even citizens, are forbidden from broadcasting any “electoral propaganda” for the last 44 hours before the election. This rule might have made sense in an age of newspapers, TV, and radio, but it’s much harder to police speech online and across borders.
Heading into the election, Macron is heavily favored. We’ll have to wait until the evening of May 7 to see what impact this last-minute document dump will have.
Published in Foreign Policy, Politics
Nothing on there but yoga routines and Chelsea Clinton’s wedding plans.
Well, I’m sure it was just some fat guy in his mom’s basement. Not any kind of nefarious meddling by a criminal and murderous Slavic regime. I just await the day that that I can read the emails RNC internal e-mails in 2020.
Must be a coincidence. Voters on the Right are far too well informed, smart and sophisticated to be swayed by common propaganda.
This is weird news. With the capability of hackers to hack anything and everything, why would hacking forty-eight hours into the French election be a surprise? The media will get its panties in a wad, blame the Russians or somebody other than the voters, and whoever wins, the other side will yell FRAUD! Then there will be a few riots and windows broken, probably by snowflakes, anarchists and paid Soros stooges, then things will calm down and life will go on – we speak from experience here….
whoops – speak of the devil:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/05/05/george-soros-battles-10b-lawsuit-familiar-charges-wielding-political-influence.html
I wonder who he paid to muck this up….
Hillary did it.
Could have been anybody.
Come on, Zafar. Although both of them are to the right of that bonehead Mélenchon, neither of them is to the right of anybody else who was running.
Now that you mention it, that does sound for familiar… Help me with my history; did that happen to Jackson or Lincoln?
Move along, Citizen, nothing to see here.
His tax evasion was also revealed.
Putin is still looking for a friend. Perhaps the French have a cruise missile deficit.
It doesn’t really matter, Merkel will have her purse poodle. Frau Merkel and the 4th Reich will not be denied.
Junker will still be a drunken idiot.
And the french will still be murdered and raped in the street. Its an imponderable problem and just the way it is after all. Its not like the french people or culture exist or anything, which Macron quite clearly says they don’t so who really cares? right?
Trump needs to start a plan to move the louvre to Kansas because the french are not responsible world actors and can’t be trusted with that much of the west’s cultural heritage. Isis will declare it all Haram and it will go the way of Palmyra. Nothing to be done. Its an imponderable problem.
Maybe it was those ” ‘hateful cowards’ and ‘true enemies of France’. The French who actually want to remain France and not be a wholly owned subsidiary of the EU.
Have the ideas that Macron or LePen promote been CHANGED through this hacking revelation?
The French voter still has the same two choices, hacked or not.
Make a choice. That is life.
Evading taxes in a socialist country? I should hope so.
Pause here while every politician goes and deletes every email.
At this point, any politician who keeps damaging emails floating in storage, is just too stupid to deserve election.
Isn’t that how socialism really works? The people in charge get to evade the taxes that others must pay, or die
Years ago I did communications work for my city government. My first day, I was informed that every city email can be FOIA-ed, so before hitting “send,” make sure you’re comfortable with the fact that they might go public at some point.
So, if I was ticked off or there was a sensitive issue, I’d just walk over to their office to talk in person. I’ve kept that attitude ever since.
It’s beyond me how some folks in high-profile positions don’t follow the same rule. (:cough: Podesta! :cough:)
I thought tax evasion was the national sport of France. Probably the damning evidence is that the candidate did not evade his taxes. I’m picturing the typical French voter (who would be Jean Gabin in my somewhat dated imagination) looking up from his copy of Paris-Soir, knocking back a Calvados, with a Gauloise hanging out a corner of his mouth, at the same time uttering the word “Con!” (Do not attempt this tres mignonne stunt yourself if you are not French or it is most highly likely it is you who become the “con,” mon amie. Only a true Frenchman can bring it off without setting fire to himself and the rest of the cafe.)
This might be the new normal for politics everywhere. Sure, the pre-election hack might have been the Russians. But it might have been WikiLeaks. It might have been Anonymous. It might have been any one of dozens of hacker groups that either have a political axe to grind or simply enjoy vandalism… especially when the mischief garners fame.
@rightangles and @titustechera should see this. Very nice S. Parker—or is it actually Sparker?
Hahaha “con” isn’t a nice word in French
Vive Le Pen!
Pol: I deleted all my emails, but they keep showing up anyway. Does anybody know of a good scrubber?
Isn’t it odd how the beneficiaries of these hacks happen to be Putin stooges?
Muh Russians are already being fingered by the usual ‘experts’.
What has amazed me about the inter-round period is the way, with a victory in the bag, Macron and the Media have doubled down on all the behaviour that will undermine his popularity and legitimacy as a President with any kind of mandate. I don’t think he deserves a mandate, but you would think he and his cheer squad would.
Well, however that may be, & although the French electorate is moving to the right, the parties & press will hold. This won’t be an 82% rally against Le Pen, like in ’02, because respectability has self-destructed. But it will be 60%, maybe a bit more.
Well, I for one hope people who are not Putin stooges learn to defend themselves! If M. Macron thought this might happen to other people, but not him–that does not speak well of him…
I’ve got my election piece coming out later today (I hope), and will post it. The (longstanding) French law that forbids media commentary liable to influence an election went into effect at midnight last night. The Interior Ministry has reminded the French media that in light of this, it’s open to criminal charges if it publishes details of the leak. They’re not just pulling this out of their butts: the law has long been on the books. As an American I of course think any law that tells what the press what it can say or when is wrong. But as a legal resident here, I’ll follow French law. Thus I won’t write about the content of the leaks or what they mean until after the election.
Nothing, of course, forbids me from reading what any of you have to say about their contents, though, so I’ll read them with interest.
A vote for Macron is a vote for Islam.