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Why should we listen? France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks (the perps were known to them beforehand anyway), and

• pweissbrod 11y ago
  Perhaps the argument is that they couldnt keep a close enough eye on the "known perps". I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps"). One could argue either way if it is the person's right to know if they are on a watchlist. I DONT feel like the argument for expanded/enhanced wiretapping for everyone is fair/valid. Aside from the fact that it feels draconian and cowardly, there isnt any hard data to back up its effectiveness.
  • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > I feel like it is a fair/valid argument to support expanded/enhanced wiretapping of those with warrants ("known perps"). If the police have a warrant then they can tap your phone, bug your house, install a hardware keylogger on all your devices, etc. etc. That has been the case forever and nobody is objecting to it. The objection is to warrantless surveillance and mandatory backdoors.
• adam419 11y ago
  "And that did nothing to stop a much larger, more complex attack" Perhaps, but I think the best way to measure the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the program is not the number of attacks that have slipped through, but the proportion of those that were prevented compared to those that slipped through.
  • egroat 11y ago
    Unless of course the program contributes to causing those attacks in the first place. Now? Probably not. 20 years time? Perhaps.
  • tsunamifury 11y ago
    This is impossible. One of the problems with the blatant misuse of forecasting is governments using it it to compare outrageous black swan futures against real history. It leads to claiming that "spying on everyone 24/7 to prevent an infinite number of terror attacks" is in everyones interest. The reality is that a limited number of black-swan terror attacks is actually a minimal cost compared to destroying social fabric modern western society is built on. This type of false thinking is what allows government officials to manipulate public thought into agreeing to give up their rights. This has literally led to the FBI radicalizing young men in order to 'catch them' in the act -- thus justifying their existence by creating the very black-swan event they are supposed to stop.
    • hokkos 11y ago
      For now it seems that terrorist attacks made more impact on social fabric than US or French surveillance.
      • loup-vaillant 11y ago
        Well, they did enable government to implement those surveillance programs. It was already in the works, but terrorism is a wonderful pretext (along with paedophilia, Nazism, and starving authors).
  • revelation 11y ago
    Soo... which were prevented? These must somehow end up as court cases eventually, right? Didn't think so.
    • talmand 11y ago
      Those cases are handled in "secret courts" run by "secret judges" with "secret prosecutors". Apparently the defense counsel is also secret since they don't come out afterwards to say what happened to their clients. Assuming the prosecuted had defense counsel.
• Qwertious 11y ago
  "I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years." The government is not the borg. They don't trust "the government", they trust various good people in the government.
  • jessaustin 11y ago
    "Trusting good people" is fine for children, but anyone who has observed the system for a few years knows better. The system has been exposed to "good people" before; it knows what to do with them.
    • PythonicAlpha 11y ago
      Correct. My observation is: The good people that come into politics either stay small numbers in the back-row ... or they get corrupted by the system and the money and maybe end up as top politician, some even as president -- but they are no good people anymore. That is the requirement for becoming somebody in politics.
  • gohrt 11y ago
    Which "good people" do they trust? They trust the idea of a paternalistic authority. They trust the government they want, not the government they have. It's wishful thinking.
• happyscrappy 11y ago
  >That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly. Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.
  • cryoshon 11y ago
    I didn't say that they were totalitarian, merely that they had taken a step in that direction. Powers are abused, 100% of the time, even if you don't find out. Steps against free society add up.
    • happyscrappy 11y ago
      >to get blackmail material on 100% of people Nonsense.
      • victorNicollet 11y ago
        We had an example not even a month ago. In many cities, there are enough parking spots for everyone, so many citizens will leave their cars for the night near their homes in places where they do not cause significant disturbance, and the police will tolerate this behavior and not ticket them for it. This is a win for everyone: the citizens have a spot to park, and the mayor doesn't have to spend public funds to set up parking spots. In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years. And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job". http://www.leparisien.fr/beauvais-60000/beauvais-des-pv-pour-se-venger-du-non-a-l-armement-de-la-police-municipale-23-10-2015-5213489.php http://www.leparisien.fr/beauvais-60000/beauvais-des-pv-pour... Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.
        • CPLX 11y ago
• berberous 11y ago
  I could be wrong on the facts here as I have not been following the story closely, but I believe that the unencrypted SMS found on a phone outside the Batcalan helped lead police to St. Denis where they killed the mastermind and several other terrorists and likely prevented a further attack. Between St. Denis and the raids in Belgium, it seems like the police likely (1) already knew a lot about many of the people involved and/or (2) were able to quickly piece together clues, both of which were probably aided by the ability to monitor digital communications. Look also at the number of targeted killings of terrorists over recent years (e.g. Jihadi John) which I would assume were aided by digital monitoring. And the terrorists are aware of the above and are now training their followers to use apps like Telegram. With 7 billion people in this world, preventing every single attack by mass surveillance alone is impossible. But I think its naive to believe that surveillance is not helpful to law enforcement or that the pro surveillance crowd is motivated by some sort of ulterior motive to blackmail people. If you are the head of the CIA or NYPD, you probably spend a lot of your time genuinely worrying about letting an attack happen on your watch and you would be strongly inclined to fight for every tool you can get. The question is whether the benefits of dragnet surveillance and weakening encryption outweigh the negatives, and like others here, I'm inclined to think they do not.
  • tsunamifury 11y ago
    Jaron Lanier writes about this problem in "Who Owns The Future" and calls it the Siren Server. People seem to continually mistake the mass collection of data and its generic processing with actual actionable intelligence. What you really end up with is a mass of data that has no meaning or function unless you already have an inclination where to look. That inclination is likely going to fall along the lines of your biases unless its in direct relation to an already occurred or ongoing event.
• hokkos 11y ago
  No France did not ramped up their surveillance because the law has just been voted few days before the attack.
• Umn44 11y ago
  "I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years." Because reasoning doesn't work that way, and many people don't grow up in nice conditions. AKA the vast majority of people are poor and have hard lives, aka no time for research. You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet. See the science on reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
  • TheBakaAniki 11y ago
    >You're on the internet, you are in the top percentage of wealthy people on the planet. I don't really think that's true anymore. Especially with cheap smartphones or tablets, LTE towers and solar panels you can reach even rural africa.
• pdkl95 11y ago
  > I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years. Because in their model of the world, evidence derives from authority. They value phatic expression and hierarchy instead of deduction and reasoning. Before you can convince such people of anything, you must first learn to speak their language. http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s/ http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi... While this essay is concerned with creationists and evolution, I encourage everybody to read it as it's observations about phatic communication - and how to overcome that roadblock in education - apply generally.
  • cryoshon 11y ago
    This article is fascinating and your comment is prescient, thank you very much for sharing this.
• implicitdef 11y ago
  (French here) "France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks" I don't think that's true. When France passed the big intelligence law this summer, the goal was to explicitly legalize the surveillance programs that were already in effect, but were until then in a grey area, legally speaking. Nobody talked about actually increasing the surveillance, or you have information that we don't.
  • talmand 11y ago
    Well, I would assume any expansion would not be mentioned because anytime someone mentions that type of information they are immediately attacked as "helping the enemy". The conspiracy theorist in me suggests that making the then current levels of surveillance proper under the law just causes them to increase the levels again afterwards. I expect in a year or two there will be talk of making the new higher levels of surveillance, previously hidden, properly legal. Rinse, repeat.
• ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  Terrorists make common cause with established governments when they inspire fear in the governed. The design goal of terrorism it to provoke overreach on the part of the authority being targeted. But you can't get an allocation of funds for your open-ended anti-terror programme if you say this. After fiftyish years of television and 100 years of movies, people's willing suspension of disbelief impulse is ragged and raw. It's both hair-trigger and numbed. And since the mode of the terrorists is akin to blood sacrifice, it's even more profound.
• threatofrain 11y ago
  I think that for things which are far away, people are free turn their beliefs in any direction which suits them. There's no obvious feedback to one's actions except for the reaction of others when they discover your political beliefs.