Pas aujourd’hui Satan
By 🔴 #BREAKING – Emmanuel #Macron elected president of France (with 65.1% of the vote) pic.twitter.com/4Vod8NNBm4
— FRANCE 24 English (@France24_en) May 7, 2017
You can pick up a feed of France 24 ici. Or you can go to Twitter and watch Nazibots not understand that France doesn’t have an electoral college.
Or read more about the last minute leak and how Macron may have caught “Fancy Bear” in a canary trap.
The mainstream French media carried the Macron campaign statement, but virtually nothing else. In addition to the normal proscription of campaign “propaganda” on election eve, the government issued a statement saying specifically that anyone disseminating the materials in this dump in France could be liable to prosecution, and calling on the media to shoulder their “responsibility” by steering clear of them.
Meanwhile, Wikileaks jumped on the document dump, but didn’t seem to be familiar with the material in it. Responding to the Macron statement that some of the items were bogus, Wikileaks tweeted, “We have not yet discovered fakes in #MacronLeaks & we are very skeptical that the Macron campaign is faster than us.”
Ah, but there’s the rub. As reported by The Daily Beast, part of the Macron campaign strategy against Fancy Bear (also known as Pawn Storm and Apt28) was to sign on to the phishing pages and plant bogus information.
“You can flood these [phishing] addresses with multiple passwords and log-ins, true ones, false ones, so the people behind them use up a lot of time trying to figure them out,” Mounir Mahjoubi, the head of Macron’s digital team, told The Daily Beast for its earlier article on this subject.
It’s likely that French campaign law made a difference, but it could be that the U.S. will go down in history as the only country where last minute leaks worked.
Update – Thanks to commentarian Newish Lawyer for the video suggestion.
