Quote:[FONT=&amp]Press Release (english)


16 February, 2017


CIA espionage orders for the last French presidential election


All major French political parties were targeted for infiltration by the CIA's human ("HUMINT") and electronic ("SIGINT") spies in the seven months leading up to France's 2012 presidential election. The revelations are contained within three CIA tasking orders published today by WikiLeaks as context for its forth coming CIA Vault 7 series. Named specifically as targets are the French Socialist Party (PS), the National Front (FN) and Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) together with current President Francois Hollande, then President Nicolas Sarkozy, current round one presidential front runner Marine Le Pen, and former presidential candidates Martine Aubry and Dominique Strauss-Khan.

The CIA assessed that President Sarkozy's party was not assured re-election. Specific tasking concerning his party included obtaining the "Strategic Election Plans" of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP); schisms or alliances developing in the UMP elite; private UMP reactions to Sarkozy's campaign stratagies; discussions within the UMP on any "perceived vulnerabilities to maintaining power" after the election; efforts to change the party's ideological mission; and discussions about Sarkozy's support for the UMP and "the value he places on the continuation of the party's dominance". Specific instructions tasked CIA officers to discover Sarkozy's private deliberations "on the other candidates" as well as how he interacted with his advisors. Sarkozy's earlier self-identification as "Sarkozy the American" did not protect him from US espionage in the 2012 election or during his presidency.

The espionage order for "Non Ruling Political Parties and Candidates Strategic Election Plans" which targeted Francois Holland, Marine Le Pen and other opposition figures requires obtaining opposition parties' strategies for the election; information on internal party dynamics and rising leaders; efforts to influence and implement political decisions; support from local government officials, government elites or business elites; views of the United States; efforts to reach out to other countries, including Germany, U.K., Libya, Israel, Palestine, Syria & Cote d'Ivoire; as well as information about party and candidate funding.

Significantly, two CIA opposition espionage tasks, "What policies do they promote to help boost France's economic growth prospects?" and "What are their opinions on the German model of export-led growth?" resonate with a U.S. economic espionage order from the same year. That order requires obtaining details of every prospective French export contract or deal valued at $200m or more.

The opposition espionage order also places weight on obtaining the candidates' attitudes to the E.U's economic crisis, centering around their position on the Greek debt crisis; the role of France and Germany in the management of the Greek debt crisis; the vulnerability of French government and French banks to a Greek default; and "specific proposals and recommendations" to deal with "the euro-zone crisis".

The CIA espionage orders published today are classified and restricted to U.S. eyes only ("NOFORN") due to "Friends-on-Friends sensitivities". The orders state that the collected information is to "support" the activities of the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)'s E.U section, and the U.S. State Department's Intelligence and Research Branch.

The CIA operation ran for ten months from 21 Nov 2011 to 29 Sep 2012, crossing the April-May 2012 French presidential election and several months into the formation of the new government.




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Quote:...the picture WikiLeaks tweeted with their download instructions has a hidden image related to the CIA's Amazon cloud services enclosed. Upon analysis of the image revealed after adjusting contrast levels of the original, TRUNEWS discovered that the picture is a snapshot of the "Lingua", a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
According to an archived 2009 page on the Washington Convention Center website regarding the Lingua, the sculpture is composed of two 16' tall cylinders, with historical text's in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Ethiopian, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Iroquois dating back as far as 1400 BC. A translation has been made available here.

The Russian-language section is a quote from Volume 3, Part 1 of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, a book ofen quoted in the world of geopolitics, and Machiavellian spy games.
The exact image of the Lingua used by WikiLeaks is featured in prominent article published in August 2013 by Gigaom, an Austin based technology, research, and analysis firm with a solid reputation in the future tech industry.
In the article titled "Why the CIA cloud contract is worth so much more than $600M; the week in cloud", Gigaom writer Barb Darrow details how the CIA paid $600 million for a 10 year contract to use Amazon Web Services for a secret interagency cloud network.
This contract remained secret until IBM, who was also in the running to provide the cloud serves to the CIA through their comparative alternative "s ibm", legally challenged Amazon's bid victory bringing the case into U.S. Court of Federal Claims and the publics sphere.
One of IBM's chief complaints stemmed from the fact that their bid was $54 million cheaper than Amazon, which was detailed in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study commissioned on the contract.
According to the GAO study, the CIA was looking for a private cloud, built to its specifications on government premises, but operated by a public cloud provider. The CIA required that the network had the capability of analyzing 100 terabytes of raw data on a cluster at a time. According to GAO, the CIA cloud would employ a MapReduce-based system to spread big data loads out over multiple clusters for simultaneous processing in the CIA cloud.
MapReduce came out of a Google approach to mapping data out to a server cluster, then assigning analysis work based on which processor was closest to the relevant data. It's a way to use commodity servers with limited storage attached in a large-scale and high-speed manner.
In a report published by GAO at the end of an analysis into the contract they stated that "while IBM's proposal offered an evaluated price advantage over five years, the (CIA) concluded that this advantage was offset by Amazon's superior technical solution." IBM rejected the GAO findings as irrational and unfounded, especially since Amazon specialized in a public cloud, rather than the private network the CIA was seeking in the bid.
Sputnik writer Cassandra Fairbanks shared IBM's suspicion the deal was sweetened by more than a non-existent technical advantage. In a story published on February 17th titled "WashPost Owner Secretly Doing Business With the CIA" Fairbanks noted that the huge contract victory occurred only 4 months after the owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, purchased the left leaning Washington Post, an outlet which has since turned into a clearing house for anti-Trump intelligence officials to publish anonymous reports of the President's collusion with Russian hackers.
"The contract was for a computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services, which services all 17 agencies within America's intelligence community," Fairbanks wrote, adding that Bezos had previously received criticism for Amazon's decision to kick WikiLeaks off of their web hosting service following the US State Department cables release.
On February 17th, former CIA official Ray McGovern also expressed his concern that Jeff Bezos had developed a fascistic relationship with the CIA through his $600m cloud service contract.
McGovern told the World Tribune that "what emerges now is what, in intelligence parlance, is called an agent of influence' owning the Post with a huge financial interest in playing nice with the CIA."
McGovern added: "In other words, two main players nourishing the national security state in undisguised collaboration."
Prior to the Amazon Web Service contract for the establishment of a secret cloud network the CIA under the leadership of infamous former Army General David David Petraeus was already exploring the use of smart devices for clandestine operations.

In a WIRED article titled "CIA Chief: We'll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher" published in March 2012, Petraeus is quoted as saying:

"Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing. The latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing."
Regardless of what is actually released tomorrow morning, its a fair to say that governments, intelligence officials, and major global corporations are frankly awaiting in anticipation for another round of potentially embarrassing and debilitating classified documents to enter the public forum.
Only Julian Assange truly knows what awaits in #Vault7 release, but with the #PodestaEmails level of interest circulating around this leak, and his expulsion from the UK Ecuadorian embassy looming, the WikiLeaks founder is not likely to disappoint his legacy with a hollow bluff.