French technologists almost all know his nickname: “Oles”, which appears in a list of a British intelligence agency targets, originally given by the former NSA operative to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and seen by Le Monde in collaboration with The Intercept. “Oles” real name is Octave Klaba, the founder of the French company OVH, Europe’s largest Internet hosting company. His email address is listed in a document from the GCHQ along other “selectors”, people considered as targets by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies.

On May 28, 2009, in a test aimed at knowing whether the intercept of a satellite liaison between Sierra Leone and Belgium was technically possible, British agents obtained a list of interesting email address which appeared in the intercepted flow of data. Among ambassadors and politicians stood the CEO of OVH, a company that was growing fast.

The presence of this email address does not show the content of emails sent and received by M. Klaba have been intercepted by British or American intelligence services; But it reveals that OVH CEO was considered a target and that his communication metadata was stored by the GCHQ.

Reasons for surveillance unclear

Why has M. Klaba been targeted? Snowden documents revealed in the past that the NSA was interested in French companies such as Alcatel or Wanadoo. In 2009, OVH is also a key company: it is a European heavyweight, has subsidiaries in 12 different countries and is among companies that have the most servers in the world. The Roubaix-based company was developing in several directions: domain name purchases, phone services and more importantly Internet hosting, and would have been a logical target for intelligence agencies whose goal is to “collect it all”.

Back then, OVH was of interest for the United States for more political reasons, that lie in its rather lax policy regarding Internet hosting. The company firmly believes in freedom of speech, which brought about UN reproaches when the company - temporarily - hosted the official website of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, suspected of war crimes. OVH was also seen by powerful US entertainment companies as too tolerant with piracy websites.

An atypical CEO

OVH is not a typical Internet hosting company and its founder looked somehow out of place in a sometimes aseptic industry. In 2010, Octave Klaba decided to host a mirror website for Wikileaks after the original website was taken down by the US government. Eric Besson, then French industry minister, promised to make this decision illegal, to no avail.

This would not the last standoff between M. Klaba and the French government. Born in Poland, his family came to France after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he has always been a staunch defender of civil and digital freedom. In 2015, he publicly disagreed over the new French law on intelligence, denouncing “the installation of black boxes and pre-programmed algorithms built to spy on Internet traffic”, but also the “real-time direct intercept systems on targeted individuals”.

What was the point of spying on Mr Klaba? It’s impossible to tell. Political or economical, the surveillance might also have a technical reasons: on several instances, the GCHQ targeted company officials and technologists to gain access to their communications. As an engineer, M. Klaba was a target of choice. The OVH founder did not want to comment Le Monde’s revelations.

In 2013, OVH was the victim of a large data theft: one or several hackers managed to infiltrate the company servers via internal mail inboxes. The investigation on the hack is still pending, but in a long message published in the company’s internal forums, M. Klaba implied that it might have been industrial espionage. He made a list of the additional protection measures put in place by the company after the hack. “In a word, we’ve not been paranoid enough. We’re now in superior paranoid mode”, M. Klaba wrote.