Jacques Follorou

Journalist at Le Monde foreign desk and intelligence issues

Jacques Follorou is a French journalist. He graduated in 1991 from the Journalist Training Center (CFJ), in Paris. He started his career in 1993 working freelance for the weekly Le Canard enchaîné. In 1996, he was hired by the daily Le Monde and worked mostly on legal cases, in particular those related to the financing of political parties and corruption. In 1998, he also covered Corsican terrorism and mafia stories. After the 09/11 attacks in the United States in 2001, he extended his investigative work to the financing of terrorism and more broadly to financial investigations. In 2008, he joined the international desk where he is in charge of Afghanistan and Pakistan, terrorism and intelligence issues.

In 2013, he started working on the material provided by Edward Snowden thanks to an exclusive contact, in France, to the american activist lawyer Glenn Greenwald to whom the former contractor of the National Security Agency (NSA) entrusted his archives. It was the beginning of a direct dialogue with the American whistleblower and ongoing investigations into the French government's surveillance system. Since then, Jacques Follorou has continued his investigations into the intelligence world by contributing, in particular, to the revelations, in 2018 and 2019, of the interference of Russian espionage in Europe. He dedicates a part his work trying to point out the weaknesses of the French legal framework for intelligence.

Jacques Follorou is the author of several books, including, in 2018, "L’Etat secret" (The Secret State, Democracy Undermined, Fayard), which comprises an exclusive interview with Edward Snowden. Jacques Follorou considers security and freedom as not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, freedom and debate contribute to security.