I think most people purposely lie to the pollsters. I know I did and do...

: Leading French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron's
: campaign said on Friday it had been the target of a
: "massive" computer hack that dumped its campaign
: emails online 1-1/2 days before voters choose between the
: centrist and his far-right rival Marine Le Pen.

: Macron, who extended his lead in the polls over Le Pen on
: Friday, is seen as the frontrunner in an election billed as
: the most important in France in decades.

: Some nine gigabytes of data were posted by a user called

: EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a document-sharing site that allows
: anonymous posting. It was not immediately clear who was
: responsible for posting the data or if any of it was
: genuine.

: In a statement, Macron's political movement En Marche!
: (Onwards!) confirmed that it had been hacked.

: "The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive
: and co-ordinated hack this evening which has given rise to
: the diffusion on social media of various internal
: information," the statement said.

: An interior ministry official declined to comment, citing
: French rules that forbid any commentary liable to influence
: an election, and which took effect at midnight on Friday
: (2200 GMT).

: The French presidential election commission said in statement
: that it would hold a meeting later on Saturday after
: Macron's campaign informed it about the hack and publishing
: of the data.

: It urged the media to be cautious about publishing details of
: the emails given that campaigning had ended, and publishing
: it could lead to criminal charges.

: Comments about the email dump began to appear on Friday
: evening just hours before the official ban on campaigning
: began. The ban is due to stay in place until the last
: polling stations close on Sunday at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT).

: Opinion polls show independent centrist Macron is set to beat
: National Front candidate Le Pen in Sunday's second round of
: voting, in what is seen to be France's most important
: election in decades. The latest surveys show him winning
: with about 62 percent of the vote.

: Former economy minister Macron's team has complained in the
: past about attempts to hack its emails during a fraught
: campaign, blaming Russian interests in part for the cyber
: attacks.

: On April 26, the team said it had been the target of a series
: of attempts to steal email credentials since January, but
: that the perpetrators had so far failed to compromise any
: campaign data.

: In February, the Kremlin denied that it was behind any such
: attacks, even though Macron's camp renewed complaints
: against Russian media and a hackers' group operating in
: Ukraine.

: In its statement on Friday, En Marche! said that the documents
: released online showed only the normal functionings of a
: presidential campaign, but that authentic documents had
: been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow
: "doubt and misinformation".

: "The seriousness of this event is certain and we shall
: not tolerate that the vital interests of democracy be put
: at risk," it added.

: The French presidential election campaign is not the first to
: be overshadowed by accusations of manipulation via computer
: hacking and cyber-attacks.

: U.S. intelligence agencies said in January that Russian
: President Vladimir Putin had ordered hacking of the
: Democratic National Committee and the chairman of Hillary
: Clinton's Democratic campaign to influence the election on
: behalf of Donald Trump, her Republican rival who went on to
: win the U.S. presidency.

: On Friday night as the #Macronleaks hashtag buzzed around
: social media, Florian Philippot, deputy leader of the
: National Front, asked on Twitter; "Will Macronleaks
: teach us something that investigative journalism has
: deliberately killed?"

: Macron spokesman Sylvain Fort, in a response on Twitter,
: called Philippot's tweet "vile".

: (Reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankfurt and Michel Rose and
: Bate Felix in Paris; Writing by Andrew Callus; Editing by
: Sandra Maler)

:
: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-macron-leaks-idUSKBN1812AZ?il=0