Economics
Macron Push to Drop CIA Code Quickens as Trump Calls EU Foe
- French president sets up team to regain technology sovereignty
- Decades of U.S. reliance are proving complicated to reverse
This article is for subscribers only.
Just weeks after Emmanuel Macron took office last year, his team went over the French state’s most sensitive activities. What it found provided a wake-up call.
The team learned that the country’s intelligence agency -- which, among other things, tracks French citizens for homegrown terrorism or anarchist activities -- uses software from a CIA-backed startup. Its code is provided by Palantir Technologies Inc., a data-mining company that started out working for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency.