On the war footing before the presidential election of 2022, the Service for vigilance and protection against foreign digital interference (Viginum) has just appointed its head.
Gabriel Ferriol, magistrate of the Court of Auditors, passed by the National School of Administration (ENA), takes the head of the agency attached to the General Secretariat of National Defense (SGDSN).
Already appointed during the summer, the number two of Viginum, Marc-Antoine Brillant, is lieutenant-colonel, saint-cyrien, patented of the School of war, also passed by the National Agency for the security of information systems (ANSSI) before joining the SGDSN.
Read alsoViginum, the state weapon against foreign digital interference, on a war footing before the presidential election
Faced with malicious foreign actors, Russian, Chinese or Turkish, Viginum will have to fight against the manipulation of information that would destabilize the electoral process. With a budget of 12 million euros, the agency now has twenty full-time people from the French administration and the private sector: social network analysts, geopolitics or social science experts. At the end of the year, it will have forty agents, then around sixty in 2022. It also has an ethics and scientific committee.
Concretely, its role will be to study the operating modes and techniques to amplify the distribution of online content.
In particular, through hashtags and inauthentic profiles, such as bots or "
trolls
".
It will analyze the target audiences and the desired effects in the narration of information, in order to go back to their origin.
A work of strategic intelligence to map the interactions between the various foreign actors who interfere in our democratic debate.
The agency's ambition is to demonstrate that certain facts shared by French citizens can be based on elements created from nothing by other countries, in order to mislead them.
Pending the green light from the CNIL
Once a hostile campaign has been characterized, and the perpetrators identified by Viginum, it is the state which will decide whether or not to launch a response strategy against a country. Like what can be done in the field of cybersecurity, it could, for example, make these interference public, freeze trade agreements and financial assets, or engage in more secret operations.
Today, Viginum is awaiting the green light from the National Commission for Informatics and Freedom (CNIL), seized in July, to regulate its capacity to collect public data on social networks. There is no question for the agency to enter private messaging loops, such as WhatsApp or Messenger. The draft decree under review should specify the legal operational framework of the service. In the coming days, the hearing of the representatives of the SGDSN will be held by the members of the college of the CNIL. The regulator will then issue an opinion which will be published a few days later. In the event that it issues an unfavorable opinion, it is a bill, and not a draft decree, which will have to frame Viginum's scope of action. This could foreshadow lively debates at theNational Assembly.
In the meantime, Viginum has started to understand the local context and the issues in the Pacific sub-region, around the 2021 referendum on the independence of New Caledonia.
The agency is also looking at Germany, where the federal elections were held on September 26.