Électricité de France, the giant power utility and the world’s biggest operator of nuclear power plants, was found guilty on Thursday of spying on Greenpeace in a bizarre and convoluted computer hacking case that also ensnared the disgraced American cyclist Floyd Landis.
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A court in Nanterre, near Paris, fined E.D.F. 1.5 million euros, or about $2 million, for complicity in concealing stolen documents and complicity to intrude in a computer network. It also sentenced two E.D.F. security officials and two security consultants to prison terms and ordered E.D.F. to pay Greenpeace 500,000 euros ($680,000) in damages.
The company had argued that it had itself been the victim, with the security consulting firm that it hired acting illegally without its knowledge.
The court also handed down suspended sentences of 12 months each to Mr. Landis — who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France victory after testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone — and his coach, Arnie Baker. Both men, who have always maintained their innocence, were tried in absentia for having received stolen documents.
I wrote in detail about this unusual case two years ago, but to sum up, E.D.F. security officials, concerned about the environmental organization’s anti-nuclear campaigns, paid a middleman to break into the computer of Yannick Jadot, the former campaign director of Greenpeace France. They ended up with a copy of his entire hard drive.
The spying was only discovered after the French police began investigating a 2006 electronic break-in at a French antidoping laboratory, a trail that led them to Mr. Landis and to his coach, Arnie Baker, who were then fighting to clear Mr. Landis’s name. The hacker turned out to have been hacking Greenpeace as well.
The judgment comes at an awkward time for E.D.F. As I noted in a post on Wednesday, the company is fighting public unease about the nuclear industry in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi disaster. What is more, the Greenpeace activists were focusing partly on E.D.F.’s troubled European Pressurized Reactor project, and the company is unlikely to welcome the renewed scrutiny.
Adélaïde Colin, a spokeswoman for Greenpeace France, said the case ‘‘should send another signal to any country considering building reactors that the nuclear industry can’t be trusted.’’
Carole Trivi, a spokeswoman for E.D.F., said the company had no comment. Mr. Landis, who has always maintained his innocence, could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Baker said he had nothing to do with any hacking.
‘‘I appreciate that a French court has exonerated me, found me not guilty, of hacking of the French National Anti-Doping Laboratory that tested Floyd Landis in the 2006 Tour de France,’’ he wrote. ‘‘The court has convicted me of having knowingly received hacked documents revealing testing irregularities from the French National Anti-Doping Laboratory that tested Floyd Landis in the 2006 Tour de France’’ — documents that Mr. Baker acknowledges having, but that he says he thought had been obtained legally.
Article source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/hacker-cyclist-executive-spy/
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