French Official Outlines Government Approach to Countering Foreign Online Operations

In a December 10 talk hosted by the Institute of Global Politics, Hervé Letoqueux, the head of the operations division at the French government’s Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference service (VIGINUM), discussed how his agency counters foreign online operations.

Founded in 2021 to protect democracy and electoral debate, VIGINUM works to identify foreign networks that are covertly influencing the public debate and release their information publicly to the media and government agencies. His agency is seated at the inter-ministerial level under the French Prime Minister, within the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security (SGDSN), France’s equivalent of the National Security Council, which allows them to collaborate and advise the Ministries of Europe and Foreign Affairs, Armed Forces, and Interior.

“There was a great fear of a ‘Ministry of Truth,’” said Letoqueux, “which is why we decided to be transparent. We only use open sources, no intelligence sources, and we have no judicial power. My mother has the same level of access as me.” 

Using largely manual detection, his agency scours the web for videos and articles replicated across multiple websites. Examining the source code and investigating the websites, they find the IP addresses to trace the networks back to their source: Russia in some cases, and most recently Azerbaijan.

The agency defines Foreign Digital Interference among four criteria: (1) the content of the message, (2) coordinated and inauthentic behavior, such as distribution by trolls and bots, (3) the source is a foreign actor, either state or para-state, and (4) targeting the fundamental interests of the nation as outlined in the French penal code, which includes the economy, health, and French institutions.

“Major actors are very lazy, and they want to make money, so they replicate their approach,” he said. “We look for laziness in the details.”

VIGINUM’s origins date to the 2017 leak of French President Emmanual Macron’s emails during the final days of the 2017 presidential election, attributed to Russian actors.

He charted one of their investigations, named Portal Kombat, that tracked Russian information operations supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine spread in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US back to one account. He also highlighted how coordination with news publications, in this case, the French journal Libération, could resolve these challenges. Libération was so-called “doppelgangered” – malicious actors created a fake, duplicate website to modify the content of Libération’s articles and influence their readers. The journal monitored visitors on their own website and published corrections.

When asked by a student about foreign malign interference in his birthplace of Taiwan and why agencies like VIGINUM decided not to attribute influence operations to their foreign backers, Letoqueux emphasized the importance of transparency. His agency releases the results and the methods for their investigations publicly so that journalists can verify their findings and draw their own conclusions. “We believe that transparency decreases mistrust,” Letoqueux noted.