Like millions of adults around the world, many heads of state and government live glued to screens, to mobile phones.
Donald Trump, president of the United States until last January and a compulsive user of the social network Twitter, may be the most extreme example, but he is not the only one.
Emmanuel Macron, who is allegedly on a target list for the Moroccan secret services' telephone espionage, cannot live without his mobile devices.
According to
Le Monde
, he has at least four.
The French president owns two iPhones that he uses for private or professional conversations and messages, but officially not secret ones. It also has a model called CryptoSmart: a Samsung with reinforced security that allows you to make calls and send encrypted text messages, although for this the receiver must have the same model. And, finally, according to the aforementioned newspaper, it has a Teorem, “an ultra-secure telephone” manufactured by the French company Thalès that, being “heavy, complex and very uncomfortable, is only used for the most sensitive communications in the Republic, protected by [the degrees of classification] confidential-defense and secret-defense ”.
One of Macron's iPhones is possibly in the viewer of the spies of the Kingdom of Morocco, as revealed this week by the media consortium Forbidden Stories and the organization Amnesty International. Morocco, according to these revelations, included the number of the president of the French Republic in a list with candidates to be infected with the Pegasus program, which the Israeli company NSO Group sells to state clients. The program allows you to capture calls, messages, contacts and photographs of the attacked devices, and even activate the microphone and the camera.
Morocco, a strategic ally of France, denies having ever contracted the Pegasus program to NSO and rejects what it describes as “baseless accusations”.
The Israeli company, for its part, maintains that Macron "has never been a target and has never been targeted by NSO clients."
In France, the debate over the slight that a friendly country might spy on the head of state quickly led to a discussion about Macron's possible levity in protecting his communications.
Since the news of an attempted espionage on Macron was published on Tuesday, the French government and the Eliseo palace have avoided summoning Morocco.
"The President of the Republic has ordered a series of investigations in the broad sense," Prime Minister Jean Castex announced on Wednesday in a television interview. But he added: "It would be irresponsible, on our part, to say things until we know exactly what it is about and the measures that this situation might require."
To address the revelations about Pegasus, Macron on Thursday convened a restricted Council of Defense and National Security, a format that meets weekly and in which the ministers of Defense, Foreign, Interior and Economy, among others, participate.
At the end of the meeting, a source from the French presidency, who requested anonymity, declared: “If the facts are proven, they are obviously very serious.
At this time, no certainty has emerged [about the disclosures], so caution is required in the comments. "
The question, for France, does not seem to be so much who spied on Macron, but why - after the scandal in the last decade over the mass surveillance of the United States National Security Agency (NSA, for its acronym in English) - the phones of the president remain vulnerable.
One explanation may be that innovation in spying technologies outpaces the development of means to protect against infections. But another is that the people in the target of the secret services do not act with due precautions. "There has been a recklessness," lamented on the RTL station Senator Bruno Retailleau, head of the Republican parliamentary group. Retailleau advised Macron to put his personal phone in a drawer and accused him of "naivety."
The daily
Libération
claimed on Thursday that Macron's predecessors - the socialist François Hollande (2012-2017) and the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012) - also used unsafe telephones without the required caution.
And he recalled that, when Sarkozy came to power, the technical chief of the French foreign intelligence service, Bernard Barbier, gave him a demonstration about how vulnerable his phones were to the intrusion of foreign powers.
"The secret does not exist," Sarkozy replied, as Barbier recalled years later, in a talk with students available on the YouTube channel.
The president then grabbed the secure phone his spies had offered him.
Always according to Barbier, he threw it away and said: "I will never use those things, in what we do there are no secrets, nothing is secret."