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Parisian sysadmin here. I'm so appalled by this article. Our government voted absurd laws allowing law enforcement to sniff all Internet traffic in France (and

• danharaj 11y ago
  I'm not sure how much freedom I actually have considering how much of my life has to be sold to someone else so I don't starve to death in the cold and rain.
  • pauleastlund 11y ago
    You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs."
    • rorykoehler 11y ago
      Much of our seeming choices are predetermined by a corporation/politician, the de rigueur political/economic philosophy of the day and also by the era we are born into. It's unfortunate this topic is out of bounds in most places. Even here on hackernews you're shutting him down. This conversation is potentially one of the most important we could be having today.
    • bildung 11y ago
      > You need to look up "freedom." It doesn't mean "other people are required to meet all of your needs." There are quite a few definitions of freedom that actually require that (to a certain degree), even on wikipedia. As in the theory of justice, there are two broad views on freedom: one side seeing freedom as something abstract (by law you are free to vote; the constitution does not discriminate against skin color, gender etc.) and the other side sees freedom as the concrete opportunity space of an individual (therefore studying should be free of cost, access to healthcare should be free etc.). Interestingly, the abstract interpretation seems to match the common meaning in the U.S. and the concrete meaning of the word is more common in Europe. That seems to explain quite a few misunderstandings in spaces like HN :) I can really recommend Amarty Sen's book 'The idea of justice' as a quite approachable introduction into the topic.
    • jqm 11y ago
      While I agree that it's true "freedom doesn't mean others should have to meet your needs" I find it a damn shame we can't stand on a little piece of ground hardly anywhere without paying someone. We are born on earth and we are entitled to a little piece of it. Powerful people shouldn't get to own everything.
    • staunch 11y ago
      > Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself." > Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market. "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
  • sbuttgereit 11y ago
    In securing your "freedom" in your own eyes, you clearly require the product of someone else's labor to consume. Why what virtue are you worthy of such freedom and by what vice should someone else be required to provide for you? Or do you not realize that you require a worse oppression for someone else... that they should spend much of their life sold to someone else and for their own benefit.
• gotchange 11y ago
  > the defeat of our freedom and the victory of terrorists I think by terrorists here, you mean the oligarchs within the regime who are either complicit by standing down or plotting outright against the citizenry or completely incompetent by not catching criminals before they wreck havoc, and not those scruffy bearded nutjobs in the desert?
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • chongli 11y ago
    Yes. This is, and always has been, the problem with society. Oligarchs wield their power to incite fear in the citizenry which in turn yields more power. It's a vicious cycle that's only occasionally punctuated by violent revolutions.
  • hokkos 11y ago
    Sorry but you live in an other world, terrorist killing 130 is enough to be scary, no need for politicians conspiring whatever your paranoid mind is thinking.
• eternalban 11y ago
  > ... Yet they cannot stop terrorists .. The 'incompetence theories' are getting thinner by day. Analog to this is the "Muslim" terrorist du jour group's 'oil production' in plain sight of God knows how many intelligence platforms are in use in air and space over the area. Possible that they don't want to stop these attacks? Possible that they actually create these events? Is is possible? Or is the narrative that the Western civilization managed to get to their pinnacle of achievement in spite of being governed and guided by "incompetent" leaders, systems, and institutions?
  • soared 11y ago
    > getting thinner by day Source? Any proof at all that they aren't just incompetent? Its not a stretch to believe gov agencies are just incompetent, considering how useless they are in general when it comes to technology.
  • krapp 11y ago
    Neither hypothesis is likely. Governments are neither perfectly malicious, nor perfectly incompetent.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • TheLogothete 11y ago
    See Opeation Gladio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
• javajosh 11y ago
  In the ideal world, the people with the clearest and most honest understanding of the world win. Within a society, those are the people who get elected. Between societies, those are the ones that survive. There is a very real distinction to be made between people who require proof for belief and those who don't. In this case, people believe that their security is proportional the the privacy they give up. That unfounded assertion, tacit in all conversations on this (even tacit in liberal conversations about it), needs to be clearly labelled as wrong and evil, and those who willfully promulgate it (like virtually all politicians in the US and Europe) need to be told: you are saying something that is wrong and evil, as bad as anything Hitler asserted about race and national power. This isn't a joke, or a goof, or a HN thread thing. This is a very real, globe-spanning conflict that will define this Age. Governments by their control of violence can do anything they want, it is up to the people to ensure it's self-restraint--and if it stops restraining itself, it is the people's right to replace that government entirely. We are now transitioning from a government hiding behind secrecy and Byzantine legal structures to government boldly asserting it's right to know everything about everyone within it's borders. It was always going to be about security. And it was always a lie.
  • bcoates 11y ago
    People keep spreading stories about a secret government conspiracy to know everything and use that power for shady means, and in an uncertain world, that's kind of comforting. The actual conspiracy is just a group of incompetents getting together to make a quick buck from the ambitious or the afraid. But just like the patent medicines sold by their 19th century counterparts, "Doesn't work" and "Doesn't hurt" aren't the same thing. Actually creating a all-knowing, all-powerful security state would require resources and competence well beyond the capabilities of present-day western governments, but in trying they can leave devastation in their wake as the dangerous mistakes they make enable new and interesting kinds of abuse, crime, and fear.
    • javajosh 11y ago
      Sorry, yeah, I guess I still vacillate between those two views (ignorance vs. evil - and what that implies about capability). There is another possibility: the hubris of the geeks-cum-heroes at the NSA. They have a science-fictional desire to do the Batman surveillance trick (from Dark Knight Rises? I forget) and Save Us All From the Bad Guy. That's dumb, because Bad Guys statistically arise equally inside and outside government. Literally every programmer at the NSA should quit and go make a cool video game or something.
• song 11y ago
  That's exactly what disgusts me. I listen to politician's speech that takes advantage of those attacks to push for more censorship, for more sniffing, for a ban on encryptions. It's a tragedy yet the actions of politicians after that makes it even more tragic by destroying our freedom. It's at times like this that I am ashamed of being French but then I realize that it would be the same in any other country and I become ashamed at the irrationality of my fellow human beings.
  • funkyy 11y ago
    "some" countries, not all. Media wants you to believe all countries have those problems, but that is not true. There is at least two dozens countries that would act on such an event rationally. Damn, even Germany would probably do something about it.
    • song 11y ago
      I wish it were so but I'm not very optimistic. In the past 20 years, I've seen overreaction from politicians in the face of any terrorist attack. And Germany doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to spying on it's own citizens despite having a substantial percentage of the population who had experience with the Stasi. But you're right that at least things seem to be getting better in Germany.
    • Trill-I-Am 11y ago
      The Snowden revelations plainly showed that all of Western Europe participates in Five Eyes mass surveillance of their populaces snd others
  • hokkos 11y ago
    Encryption limitation only come from CIA, FBI and US politicians. Censorship of Islamist propaganda is needed when we have 1500 terrorists citizen in Syria and Iraq.
    • song 11y ago
      We had French politicians talking about limiting encryptions this time. Censorship doesn't work. It just drives the discourse underground and often enough makes it even more attractive. The only way for censorship to work is to take it to at least the same extremes as China and have a system of delation in place to denounce people guilty of forbidden speech. I, for one, am not ready to sacrifice my freedom like this for an hypothetical increase in security.
• puppetmaster3 11y ago
  I think these two paragraphs are the most important words of our times, the century we were alive in.
• zby 11y ago
  I don't think this inefficiency will be permanent. This surveillance is a new thing, the tools are not yet used to their full potential. It will take time before many police officers understand all the possibilities and use the tools effectively. It is also possible that they are already used in their full potential against the adversaries that matter. Terrorist don't really matter in the power balance - they might be a nuisance - but only indirectly - via the public pressure. They don't pose any direct threat. They might be even useful. Also if it was so ineffective than the lose of privacy would also be as ineffective. After all we fear the lose of privacy because we believe that the government, or the business could act upon the data they gather about us.
  • stefantalpalaru 11y ago
    Mass surveillance is effective for gathering data about the past of a certain target so you can blackmail them. It's obviously not effective in preventing anything. There's just too much data to analyze and keyword based searches are a weak tool. You also need to realize that people that were doing unpleasant surveillance in parked cars, at night, trying to figure out what a known arms dealer was up to, are now enjoying the comfort of a desk, looking at a database of intercepted SMSes that don't make any sense, and waiting for the shift to end.
    • zby 11y ago
      It is probably more useful for blackmail than in prevention - this is a good point. But it is far from obvious that it is ineffective in the letter case. If you believe that it is obvious - then please explain. There is also another case which is finding out who did it - and in recent reports of police investigations there is always about use of surveillance cameras. The surety of being caught is also important in prevention. Maybe less in the case of suicide terrorists - but they are really a minority of all crime. I have the feeling that people are so much against surveillance that they cannot stand any analysis of the arguments used. This is counterproductive.
      • stefantalpalaru 11y ago
• GigabyteCoin 11y ago
  >Most acquaintances ... just don't care "as long as I'm safe". Moxie Marlinspike wrote a great blogpost 2 years ago titled "Why we should all have something to hide". [0] I suggest that you read it so that you have some ammunition against those who are uninformed about why their privacy matters so much in the future. [0] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/we-should-all-have-somethin...
• voynich61 11y ago
  >We're rolling down a dangerous hill which will lead to the defeat of our freedom and the victory of terrorists. Liberaltarian fear-mongering is becoming as divorced from reality as the neo-con strain. Do you genuinely believe that the French government is going to become a tyrannical dystopia? I can't imagine this _freedom_ you are slavishly devoted to being anything else than the freedom to consume media for free with impunity or to say stupid shit on 4chan or HN without the government knowing. So the government sniffs a few packets. It's major news whenever a Western government does anything that could even remotely be construed as an abuse of power; even the Snowden leaks are laughably underwhelming in this regard. I suppose people crave existential threats, because they are interesting. Maybe some day you'll wake up from this 1984-inspired fever dream and see how boring the reality of the situation really is.
  • a3n 11y ago
    > Do you genuinely believe that the French government is going to become a tyrannical dystopia? None of the developed western societies want that. All of us will succumb to it, via the best (and worst) of intentions.
    • voynich61 11y ago
      If you're going to make such a grandiose claim, you should provide some evidence.
  • oldmanjay 11y ago
    What I find interesting is that you don't even try to justify government surveillance, you just approach it as if the natural state of affairs is that they get to know everything. I sincerely hope that you are in a minority with such a dangerous, misguided belief, but I suspect you are not.
    • voynich61 11y ago
      >dangerous In the extreme, yeah, it's dangerous. We're so far from that point in the Western world that I don't fear it right now. >natural state of affairs Yes, it is the natural state of affairs that the government have the power to snoop on us with a warrant. Otherwise, law enforcement has their hands tied behind their back. 1st grade civics tbh
• hokkos 11y ago
  So what are your suggestions ? Every rental car company should forward the identity of every client to the secret service ? Every hotel and airbnb host should send the name of their client to the DGSE ? Don't you see that most of the laws they voted are just the transposition from what where done in the real world to the internet ? For example hidden microphone in a suspect home applied to the internet is a spyware. Unconfirmed report didn't that said that policemen but the CIA equivalent the DGSE listened a conversation where a woman said she wanted to be a martyr. A meeting was scheduled with the FBI equivalent the DGSI but too late. This is undeniably a failure and the services should be quicker and more cooperative between them. But we don't know if they listen to the same threats every days, when there is 11000 extremist Muslims for 5000 secret agent and less than 10000 in both services.
  • facepalm 11y ago
    If you own a car or live somewhere, you actually have to register with the police. In that light it doesn't seem so far fetched to me to demand the same for temporary rentals.
    • LBarret 11y ago
      You have to draw the line somewhere. It is a balance between reasonnable information for the police and privacy. Except when you're linked to an investigation, you don't have to proove you're innocent of any crime. Still, all those laws seems to think the opposite : police will have access to all your data like if you were convicted. Guilty until prooven innocent. Beside, it's not like governments never abuse this kind of info.
      • facepalm 11y ago
        I'm just saying what is the status quo, at least in my country. But I assume it is the same in the US. If you have a car, you need to register a license plate. If you live somewhere, you have to announce your residency to the administration of your city. I am not advocating anything.
• awqrre 11y ago
  In a world without privacy and freedom, democracy has issues and government abuses are going wild.