[ Hacking the French Treasury ] Don't Blame Me — Blame the Government!

Fixated on spying on the French, pres. Macron's administration keeps pushing for encryption backdoors — while a bill vital to the nation's cybersecurity has languished, blocked, for a year.

Emmanuel Macron is never wrong — or rather, he never admits to being wrong, which amounts to the same thing: never correcting course. His method is well-rehearsed: when something goes awry, find a scapegoat, a fuse to blow, and that fuse is invariably the civil service. His successive governments have turned this routine into their entire style of governing. They “own it,” they say.

The Lyhanna case (a young girl abused and murdered by a known peadophile) offered yet another demonstration. Macron laid the blame on the judiciary, provoking an unusually forceful pushback — press release and all — from the Prosecutor General’s office at the Court of Cassation (France’s highest criminal court). A well-deserved reply: someone, at last, had to refuse to stay silent.

Want to know why the machinery of the State no longer plays along with the schemes of those in power? It’s had its fill of taking the fall for their incompetence and their negligence.