Archiv: Disclose.ngo (independent media / devastating encryption)


28.09.2023 - 17:50 [ Disclose.ngo ]

Surveillance made in France

The French SME had a major advantage: since 2012 it had had a commercial arm based in the Emirates, Advanced Middle East Systems. “This creation was done with the greatest transparency of information with the French services”, Nexa Technologies still asserts. On 24 March 2014, its directors, Stéphane Salies and Olivier Bohbot, won an €11.4 million contract to install its flagship software, Cerebro, in Cairo. According to a confidential document obtained by Disclose, Cerebro is said to be able to “analyse data to understand the relationships and behaviour of suspects, going back in time to find relevant information in billions of recorded conversations”. The contract was called “Toblerone”, after the Swiss chocolate in the shape of a pyramid.

In the wake of this, Stéphane Salies, Nexa‘s CEO, advised the Emiratis to bring in Ercom-Suneris. Jackpot. In the summer of 2014, Pierre-Mayeul Badaire, Ercom‘s CEO, signed a contract for nearly €15 million to spy on phones up and down the Nile. The Egyptian military was primarily interested in one feature: geolocating their targets in real time using their Cortex Vortex software. “It‘s like a spy movie”, explains a former Ercom engineer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “You can geolocate a person by triangulating the position of the base stations which their phone is connected to, even without them making any calls”.

28.09.2023 - 15:30 [ Disclose.ngo ]

The mercenaries of the sky

(November 22, 2021)

Laurent Aubigny’s name is well-known to the Sirli operational team, both civilian and military. Between 2016 and 2018, as then deputy director for research at the DRM, he supervised the agents’ mission in the field. It is also him who, since December 2020, presides over CAE Aviation, in what could appear to be a conflict of interest. Under the French defence code, a member of the armed forces does not have the right to join, within a period of three years after leaving their job in the military, “a company which they have been in charge of monitoring or controlling” or “with which they have concluded contracts or given advice upon contracts”.

According to that stipulation, Aubigny was entitled to join CEA Aviation only as of 2021. Contacted by Disclose, the French military’s deontology commission, which is in charge of studying such cases, did not reply to the questions submitted. Similarly, both the management of CEA Aviation, and the DRM, did not respond to questions submitted by Disclose.

28.09.2023 - 14:30 [ Disclose.ngo ]

Operation Sirli

(November 21, 2021)

The documents, kept confidential under France’s national “national defence secrecy” regulations (“le secret de la défense nationale”), originate from the services of the presidential office, the Élysée Palace, the French armed forces ministry, and the French military intelligence services. They show how this military cooperation exercise, kept secret from the public, was diverted from its original mission, that of reconnaissance of terrorist activity, in favour of a campaign of arbitrary executions. It involved state crimes about which the French presidential office was kept constantly informed, but which took no action.

28.09.2023 - 14:15 [ Disclose.ngo ]

Egypt Papers

Sunday, November 21, 2021

Disclose has obtained hundreds of secret documents, circulated at the highest levels of the French state, which reveal the responsibility of France in crimes committed by the dictatorship of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt. Discover “the terror memos” in a week-long series of investigative reports, beginning this Sunday November 21st.