How was Éric Zemmour’s team able to contact by SMS, just before the 1st round, ten thousand French people of the Jewish faith? A criminal investigation was opened by the Paris prosecutor’s office on Tuesday, April 12, after the discovery of these messages sent by the team of the presidential candidate.
This investigation was opened for “possession, storage, recording, transmission of personal data outside the cases provided for by law” and “communication to a third party without authorization and misuse of the purposes of a personal data file” , after two complaints filed by two Jewish associations, the Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) and the association J’accuse AIPJ, concerned about the existence of such lists with religious connotations.
Several questions thus remain unanswered and in particular, the first: how did the candidate obtain their numbers? This is what Acher, for example, who received this message on Friday, April 8, asks for, two days before the first round and a few hours before the reserve period which prohibits any political communication.
“Just before the start of Shabbat, I received a text message from Éric Zemmourhe says, with this questioning of the candidate: “Will we be able to live in peace for a long time in France? I clicked on the link and I came across a ‘message to French people of the Jewish faith’, something very alarmist. Basically, if you don’t vote for me, our children will suffer. Not all of my Jewish friends received it, but none of my non-Jewish friends did. Of course, that’s a little scary. And then, we don’t know: if they got our phone number, do they have the address? It reminds us of rather dark hours in our history and in the history of France.“, concludes Acher, who is therefore one of the tens of thousands of people who have received this message denouncing the problem of anti-Semitism in France and the “scum” who “rot the life” Jews as well as Islamist terrorism.
“For the first time, in the context of a presidential campaign, we have a real ethnic file used by a candidate for electoral purposes. We don’t remember such a list of Jews since the Vel d’Hiv roundup.”thus denounces Master Sacha Ghozlan, lawyer of one of the associations which lodges a complaint, denounces the practice.
For its part, Éric Zemmour’s team, which won 7.07% of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, explains having used a “personal data broker“. Except that it is forbidden to constitute such listings on the basis of religious convictions, unless one has expressly given his consent. The penal code punishes such an act with five years in prison, and 300,000 euros in fine.
“We do not know exactly how they recovered this database, on what basis they did this profiling, that is to say, to divide the database according to a very specific category which could be religious belief or particular conviction, says Me. Alexandre Lazarègue, lawyer specializing in digital law. You can absolutely use databases, you can buy databases. This is completely legal, but we must ensure the consent of the individuals who are concerned by this database. And obviously, there is something strictly forbidden: directing the message according to a religious belief, without the people who receive this message having consented to it. It is for this reason in particular that, Monday, April 11, the National Commission for Computing and Freedoms (Cnil) had opened an investigation after this canvassing.