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Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

Two things happened in the French election. First, someone created a forged document, purporting to show that Macron had a secret offshore bank account, and published it on 4chan. (The forgery was poorly done, and was recognized immediately). Second, someone hacked the Macron campaign's computers and published all their emails. (Possibly with fake emails mixed in, though I haven't heard of any specific emails from that dump being fake).

This article claims that the first of these, the forged document, was done by Weev (aka Andrew Auernheimer). However, the second of these - the email data dump - has not been attributed to Weev and was likely done by someone else.

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From what I read this was also muddied by the fact that Macron's team had honeypot email accounts set up with fake emails inside too. Talk about a mess!

Isn't weev supposed to be at least somewhat technically competent? The first leaked document seems to have been produced by someone with very little knowledge of image manipulation, or what actually happens under the hood of technology, given how trivial it was to prove that it was fake.

I think if you asked my fellow (and often far-more) technically competent engineers many would be hard-pressed to create any chops, let alone realistic ones that pass the gaze of the crowd.

Weev is a high functioning polydrug abusing sociopath dedicated to short term pleasure. Don't confuse yourself.

Agreed. He has little to no actual skill, which made his conviction somewhat of a joke as well.

Obtaining access to a system, and faking the information you'd get from obtaining access to a system, are very different skills; being good at one does not automatically translate to being good at the other.

And producing convincing fake information is in general a pretty specific skill (and one that, thankfully, even very dedicated people are usually quite bad at).

I'm surprised that there has been next to no coverage of the email leaks, and the media has appeared to focus on discrediting the forgery instead.

When the leaks came out it was reported that French media was not allowed to publish anything about the leaks or face prosecution. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/06/french-warned-...

Which isn't as terrible as it sounds, France has a law that does not allow campaigning or reporting on candidates for 24 (or 48?) hours before an election.

The law is intended to give people time to reflect and think for themselves without being influenced before they go to vote.

Here is the actual law[1], article 49 of electoral code:

  Starting the day before voting at zero hour, it is 
  forbidden to distribute bulletins, circular and other 
  documents

  Starting the day before voting at zero hour, it is also 
  forbidden to broadcast electoral propaganda messages using
  an electronic public communication.

This explains with an election day newspaper still had a full cover titled "Do as you want but vote macron"[2], but does not explain why there were official legal threats used to deter reporting on the leak.

[1]: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte... [2]: http://monde.taibaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/arton45...

It's actually a very good law I think. The US could really do with that...

To be clear they were invited by the National Commission for the Control of the Presidential Campaign not to diffuse the leak without verifying if the documents were genuine. They reminded them that if they did diffuse fake documents they risked legal action against them.

Translated from french newspaper: The National Commission for the Control of the Presidential Campaign (CNCCEP) on Saturday called on the media and "citizens" not to relay the contents of these internal documents. The proceeding had been seized, in the evening of Friday, by En marche !. After meeting on Saturday morning to "take stock", she stresses in a statement that "the dissemination or the re-broadcasting of such data, obtained fraudulently and in all likelihood, may have been misinterpreted, is likely To receive a criminal qualification for several reasons and to engage the responsibility of its authors ". The CNCCEP warns: "On the eve of the most important election deadline for our institutions, it calls on all actors present on websites and social networks, first and foremost the media, but also all citizens, In order not to alter the sincerity of the ballot, not to violate the prohibitions laid down by law and not to expose oneself to the commission of criminal offenses "

source: https://twitter.com/cnccep/status/860636738116608005

The french media are still reporting on it. Mostly to say they couldn't find anything damaging, and that it was most likely meant to push a conspiracy agenda ("press is hiding scandals").

(fr link) http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/05/17/les-macronlea...

I've also heard it was pretty bad in term of privacy with personal details of Macron supporters being published in the dump (and at least in some screenshots I've seen, there were random person address including their building access code).

The link you provide states that the leak contains no breaking news revelation because email was not the communication canal used for important matter. But despite the absence of such revelation does not mean the leak is void of significant content.

This echoes what other media have reported, that nothing illegal has been found in the financing of the campaign but it shows that it got its money from banking networks and start-ups exposing the link between Macron and banks which has been denied during the campaign[1].

There are a number of other legitimate questions raised by the data found in the leak such as how Macron got access to parti socialiste's budget for the 2012 presidential campaign for example. Link this with the fact that parti socialiste pulled the rug under the feet of its own candidate while parti socialiste's current president Hollande was not a candidate and secretly suported Macron and you get a behind the scene glimpse on this french presidential election.

[1]: http://www.liberation.fr/elections-presidentielle-legislativ... and https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/130517/la-pis...

The late came out too late to have an effect on the outcome of the election. And Macron's campaign handled the leak very professionally which led to little media fallout.

The timing of the release of the leak is suspicious. Just in time to be too late to have an effect, and right before the "période de réserve". Maybe a last push to demonize Macron's opponent ?

This leak happened at the end of an election where pretty much everything seems to have been orchestrated to turn a two rounds election into a one turn plebiscite for Macron:

- small irrelevant candidates easily got their required 500 signatures (cheminade, lasalle, etc.) while serious candidates struggled (mélenchon, lepen)

- the outsider (fillon) had scandals made public all over the media while what he did is politics as usual and other candidates scandals got no coverage

- the direct contender (hamon) had his own political party pull the rug under his feets with rumors that the party was preparing for macron's victory.

- media gave a lot of attention to lepen both pushing her by reporting it was inevitable she'll qualify for second round and demonizing her at the same time to make sure she would not win.

And the list of suspicious things continues, the last one and not the most significant being macronleaks being released with a weird timing.

You possibly didn't look enough. For instance, the following from nytimes.com: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/world/europe/macron-hacki...

And in case this reads as ex-post-facto justification, there is in fact this article from 10 days before the leaks: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/25/fighting-ba...

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