Don’t Hack the Hippies: Nuclear giant EDF found guilty of spying on Greenpeace via Greenpeace

As the great Mahatma Gandhi (nearly) said, ”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they spy on you, then you win”.

That’s pretty much the chain of events that lead to today’s conviction by a French court of French state electricity company, Electricité de France SA (EDF) for spying on us. The court fined the company 1.5 million Euros and ordered it to pay €500,000 in damages to Greenpeace France. In addition, the court sent the four men involved, two of them senior EDF executives, to jail as well – and fined three of them.

EDF’s spying operation monitored Greenpeace while we challenged plans by the UK government to work with EDF to expand its nuclear operations. Clearly worried about this – and losing the nuclear debate in France, EDF somehow decided a cloak and dagger espionage operation was the way to go. In 2006, the company hired private investigation company Kargus Consultants to spy on Greenpeace France. Kargus went too far, and hacked into, then stole 1,400 documents from the computer of Greenpeace France’s programme director. But they got caught.

The men prosecuted were Pascal Durieux, head of EDF’s nuclear safety at EDF in 2006, Pierre-Paul Francois, EDF’s second in command of nuclear safety security during the same period; Thierry Lorho, the boss of Kargus, and Alain Quiros, Kargus computer scientist.

Continue reading at Don’t Hack the Hippies: Nuclear giant EDF found guilty of spying on Greenpeace

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