New world is interested this Sunday, April 10, on the occasion of the first round of the presidential election, in the many digital tools made available to the future head of state.
The first tool of the President of the Republic is the network: a network reserved for the government whose heart is in a bunker under the Invalides in Paris. Her name ? ISIS as “Secure interdepartmental intranet for governmental synergy”. ISIS makes it possible to exchange information up to the “confidential defense” level, but it requires the use of special PCs. Their number would be several thousand, scattered over a few hundred official sites. On this network, is grafted a secure video-conferencing technology called HORUS: it connects the Élysée, Matignon and several crisis centers, in particular to the Ministries of the Interior and Defense.
Second tool: messaging. And then it starts to get complicated. For three years, the French state has had its own equivalent of WhatsApp: Tchap, in homage to Claude Chappe, the inventor of the optical telegraph. A sovereign application with servers in France, a mastered technology, except at its launch. In April 2019, a hacker managed to create an account from a fake Élysée email address and infiltrate discussion groups.
Since then, Chap has been widely adopted including in the police and the gendarmerie. Several hundred thousand civil servants use it. Chap has also been accessible to parliamentarians since May 2020. However, at the top of the state, this tricolor application which runs on smartphone, tablet and computer has not completely replaced WhatsApp which belongs to Meta-Facebook or Telegram, of Russian origin . The reflexes of life before are sometimes difficult to lose, including at the Elysée.
The president also has at his disposal an ultra-secure telephone: the famous TEOREM (“cryptographic telephone for state and military network“) ordered from Thalès by the General Directorate of Armaments (DGA) in the early 2000s, delivered from from 2011. It is a flip phone whose appearance, very marked by the design of the 1990s, plays against it, which does not prevent it from being prized in certain circles because it designates the most strategic people , and not only because it is sold for up to 4,500 € each.
TEOREM is not a wildly user-friendly mobile: no app – installing them is impossible -, no directory. Each owner of a TEOREM can be reached via a 5-digit number that correspondents often exchange by calling each other via a landline before continuing in secure mode.
For all these reasons, the president has long refused to be equipped with it. It must be said that a soldier in charge of his secure communications follows him permanently if necessary. The president also has a classic, highly secure Android smartphone, but it’s unclear how he actually uses it.
Recent history shows, in any case, that it is very difficult to give up your personal telephone when you arrive at the Élysée. The Pegasus scandal – named after this Israeli spyware – revealed that at least one of the president’s two personal iPhones was tapped, as were those of several ministers.
François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac had also refused to part with their personal phone, yet a priority target for the big ears of the American NSA, as revealed the Guardian in 2013, but also Russians and Chinese. Among the 12 candidates for the presidential election of 2022, all or almost all use the general public messengers such as WhatsApp or Telegram, the confidentiality of which is still in question.