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Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

184 points by mineshaftgap 11y ago

adventured 11y ago
The US has a huge influence over other free nations, and has especially since WW2. They mimic the US, they take cues from the US in terms of what behavior is acceptable, they often expect the US to lead by example. In the two centuries prior to WW2, Europe was dominated by dictators and monarchies. Afterward, the entire region was remodeled on American style government representation, modern central banking, market economies and so on. Behaviorally for example, they followed the US into a global war on drugs that has been an epic failure, and fortunately they're going to follow the US back out of it too. They followed the US into a global war on terrorism, that mostly consists of cracking down on domestic freedom in the false name of security. The US isn't responsible for what France is doing, but the US is leading the so called free world down the wrong path.
- kghose 11y ago
  "The US isn't responsible for what France is doing" I hate this soft-pedalling. You should go all the way with anti-Americanism. Otherwise its just mealy mouthy.
  - adventured 11y ago
    I'm the opposite of anti-American, and I don't appreciate the insult. What I said is factually correct.
- yodsanklai 11y ago
  > Behaviorally for example, they followed the US into a global war on drugs that has been an epic failure, and fortunately they're going to follow the US back out of it too. I noticed that popular US fictions show cannabis in a very good light. For instance, Sergent Baptista in Dexter smokes a joint in his car after work, and it's cool. Or Brody's teenage daughter in Homeland smoke weed with her friend, and although it's frowned upon, it's apparently not that big of a deal. And the list goes on... Eventually, I believe these fictions will lead to a better acceptation, and possibly legalization of cannabis in other countries (such as France) which are still very much opposed to it.
  - adventured 11y ago
    The US will federally legalize marijuana in the next 10 to 20 years, that's almost a guarantee at this point. That'll tear down a lot of the global war on drugs, including a lot of financial & trade pressure systems that have been put into place to enforce it. As that happens - and we're already seeing it now - more countries will feel free to liberalize on drug policies, no longer fearing US reprisal or group-pressure tactics. France will be surrounded by countries that legalize or at least de-criminalize marijuana heavily, and they'll follow suit (they'll practically have to, whether they get out in front of it, or are dragged that direction by cultural forces greater than their own politics).
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Afterward, the entire region was remodeled on American style government representation, modern central banking, market economies and so on. No, not really. The dominant form of government in Europe is the parliamentary republic (several at the backdrop of constitutional/ceremonial monarchies), compared to the more unique federalist model of the United States where there is a strict separation between the union and localities, and the President being the head executive as opposed to a Prime Minister. Europe was also quicker to apply mixed market principles and has generally been higher on the dirigisme aspect (even though the US is hardly some paragon of non-interventionism itself). Central banking was initially a European (British, I think?) invention.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > The dominant form of government in Europe is the parliamentary republic You mean "parliamentary democracy" (which is a subtype of representative democracy), not "parliamentary republic". "Republic" specifically means the absence of a monarch, which, as you note, is not a feature of many of the systems at issue. (Some, however, are republics, as well as parliamentary democracies.) > Central banking was initially a European (British, I think?) invention. The Bank of England wasn't the first central bank (Sweden, at least, had one first), though its often credited as being the dominant model for later central banks. It does seem to be a European invention.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      BIS (central bank of central banks) is based in Switzerland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settleme...
    - icebraining 11y ago
      You mean "parliamentary democracy" (which is a subtype of representative democracy), not "parliamentary republic". "Republic" specifically means the absence of a monarch, which, as you note, is not a feature of many of the systems at issue. As far as I know, both are true; most European countries nowadays are republics. There are only 12 monarchies in Europe, and three (Andorra, Monaco and the Vatican) are micronations.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Funny I talked about a U.S guy on a trip the other day, he said he wasn't in favor of security over liberty. By the time the U.S backpedal, the rest of the world will 'enjoy' false security measures.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Erm, I think you're being a little too US-centric here. In the two centuries prior to WW2, Europe was dominated by dictators and monarchies. Afterward, the entire region was remodeled on American style government representation, modern central banking, market economies and so on. France had a populist revolution around the same time as the US, then got swept up in Napoleonic dreams of empire, then got rid of Napoleon. The country is not reliant on the US for a political identity for for economic ideas - indeed France has long rejected the conventional wisdom of 'Anglo-Saxon capitalism'. As far as things like spying and surveillance go, the French have been doing that sort of thing for centuries. Get hold of a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses which is a a manual of psychological warfare and intrigue dressed up as a sexploitation story. Behaviorally for example, they followed the US into a global war on drugs that has been an epic failure, and fortunately they're going to follow the US back out of it too. To some extent, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that other countries had chips on their shoulders about drugs for their own reasons, eg China's experience int he opium wars of the 19th century has informed the attitudes of most SE Asian countries about drugs and goes a lot farther towards explaining their extremely hardline attitudes towards drug trafficking than US leadership in that area. I get the point you are trying to make, but I think you should broaden your historical perspective.
cognome 11y ago
Note that the nyt photo is misleading. The hémicycle was 3/4 empty when the law was voted. vote by pricuration.
analyst74 11y ago
Talking to friends lived or are still living in France, here are just some of the problems I heard: - in Paris, it's common to get robbed, and sometimes beaten up if you are not careful, and cops can do nothing. This is from a guy who went to school in Paris, I can't imagine what's it like to be a girl. - some of the non-French speaking neighbourhoods are quite dangerous, even cops would avoid going there for their own safety. - many people don't have ID, or use fake ID, so it's easy for criminals to get away. Those lawmakers might be inspired by their American counterparts, but they definitely have some level of local support.
- yodsanklai 11y ago
  > some of the non-French speaking neighbourhoods are quite dangerous there are no such thing as "non-French speaking neighborhoods" in France.
  - smeyer 11y ago
    I'm an American who isn't very knowledgeable about France. Could you expand on this a little bit? There are definitely neighborhoods in the US where even if many people speak English, it's not the dominant language in the neighborhood. For example, places where more signs and labels on shops and such are in some other language than are in English. Are there no similar neighborhoods in France where another language dominates over French?
    - nraynaud 11y ago
      the biggest immigrant community in the US is Mexican so they have a common language that is Spanish. In France it's Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, where they all speak good french and a local dialect of arabic (let's say 60% french speaking people in all 3 countries, declining towards the local dialect), so it's easy to get the French as a common idiom. So you have many languages, but it's easier for everybody to use French anyways. On the food packages, the second most common language (often exactly the same size as the french) is ... Dutch ... Ok, we'll have to go north and speak about Belgium. Those packages are sold in all european French speaking countries (Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Belgium, in one day of trucking you can cross the area). Of those countries only Belgium and Switzerland have another language as official language, and only Belgium require to have both of it's national languages on its packaging (another story of bigotry for next time). One exception to the language distribution I talked about might be the Chinese community, being such a populous country, they can be enough immigrants in an area to avoid French altogether, I don't know them very well, they are very concentrated in small areas, and I don't know if they speak both mandarin and cantonese, or if the majority is from only one linguistic area. But I'm pretty sure the kids speak french at school, it's mandatory and in French here.
yodsanklai 11y ago
I'm wondering, is it possible to circumvent the surveillance, still enjoy a good internet experience, while not devoting too much resources? I suppose it starts with a VPN service. I use VPNs occasionally, but never in a systematic way. How convenient are they in term of reliability and performance? then, what about gmail? are there other email providers that offer better privacy guarantees and offer a comparable service?
- nraynaud 11y ago
  VPN will make you a target. That's the whole point of recording at the ISP level, the traffic is still quite individualized.
  - higherpurpose 11y ago
    Saying "encryption makes you a target" represents a lack of understanding for how spy agencies monitor all communications. It's not like spy agency analysts target only some people and when they are in their offices and see some encrypted traffic from someone they go: "AHA! This guy uses encryption - let's monitor his (encrypted) communications and his metadata!" It's more like everyone's wide-open communications are monitored in real-time and automatically searched for keywords. Not using encryption makes you more exposed and vulnerable to mass surveillance, not less, because everything is exposed by default without encryption and everything is searched. It doesn't matter whether you're plotting an attack or "only talking about cats (therefore they can't possibly be interested in what I'm saying!)". It doesn't work like that, because there isn't a human that does the automatic searching, but software. To make it even simpler: it's like law enforcement saying "hmm, this guy put curtains on his windows - he must have something to hide! Let's watch him more closely to see where he's going when he leaves the house, and such" vs you going to law enforcement and giving them a daily report of what you've been doing, as well as full recordings of everything you talked about. Which is worse?
    - nraynaud 11y ago
      in that framework, consider that encryption is just a special keyword. And then they see that not a lot of people use it, then they have an opportunity to add just a bit more effort to those cases (maybe just storing the encrypted traffic), because there are so few.
fermigier 11y ago
This is a huge setback, both for democracy and for the french tech ecosystem. While the most preeminent french hosting and cloud providers (OVH, Online, Gandi, Alter Way...) have been quite vocal about the issue, none of the big french telcos (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) have said a single word about it. Shame on them! 900 tech companies, research organisations, and trade associations (so far) have asked the government to reconsider the law proposal (http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/en/ http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/en/), with not success, obviously. Several organisations I'm part of (including the two companies I have founded) where part of the movement, of course. There is still some hope that the law will be modified, by the french Senate, or that it will be censored by the french Constitutional Council, or the European Court of Human Rights. We also plan to start evangelising people on the use of VPNs.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  http://www.iliad.fr/en/ http://www.iliad.fr/en/ Online.NET is a big TelCo as well fyi. They own http://mobile.free.fr/ http://mobile.free.fr/ etc. But yeah, I've dropped my OVH/Online.net servers in favor of more Hetzner nodes with the exception of their S3 competitors [I just can't find any equivalent price/performance/availability]. That and I front end the S3 competitors anyway via a CDN over https which I think is fine with this legal framework [it just sniffs unencrypted traffic iirc] If you are making that kind of switch and are looking for bootstrapping automation for bare metal nodes at Hetzner: https://github.com/asconix/hetzner-bootstrap-coreos https://github.com/asconix/hetzner-bootstrap-coreos https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/leitmedium/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/leitmedium/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/RedMoonStudios/hetzner https://github.com/RedMoonStudios/hetzner
- malka 11y ago
  I plan to use VPN in area that are NOT friendly with the OTAN, such as Russia. I'd rather have Putin spy on me, than my own governement, or its allies. He has far less influence over my life, and I doubt that french and russian intelligence are cooperating.
  - 11y ago
teamhappy 11y ago
It's going to be very interesting to hear their excuses for this kind of nonsense. By now we now it'll hurt the french population most. It'll hurt their economy second (I'm a big fan of Gandi, but that might change very soon), and it won't protect anybody either. I have hoped learning from the mistakes the US gov made after 9/11 would be the one good thing coming out of 9/11.
- sans-culottes 11y ago
  One would hope they would have learned. But France has always been a police state. The only difference is, now they are now openly admitting to it.
- Qantourisc 11y ago
  I'm a customer too, will be at least moving the server to a different data-centre soon. In terms of mail, I'm not sure what to do, I _DO_ know that you not only need to trust the transportation of your mail, but also the receiving end. I have know times, when using secure communication, only to have the receiver store the messages in the USA.
aikah 11y ago
"socialists" ... at that point if you vote PS you're a usefull idiot.
- S4M 11y ago
  I am politically on the right wing (in the French way), but Sarkozy is no better, honestly - amongst other things, he tried to push his then 19 years old son to become head of the administration managing the business area of La Defense (dealing with several billion of euros). I have no doubt he would have done the same as the PS is doing now would he be in power.
  - aikah 11y ago
    I never said UMP is any better, in fact there is very little difference between both parties, aside from the Kabuki theater during the elections. The french political elite is rotten to the core. I'm left leaning by the way and I used to vote for these douche bags.
iuyoiuyy 11y ago
People need to wake up to the fact that many of these so-called terrorist attacks are in fact being done by the intelligence services, which is to say they are false flag operations, the sole purpose of them being to push through a far right wing agenda that involves surveillance, unending war and eventually Mass incarceration. http://www.globalresearch.ca/state-sponsored-terrorism-who-was-behind-the-charlie-hebdo-paris-attacks/5425322 http://www.globalresearch.ca/state-sponsored-terrorism-who-w... PS: this comment will likely be censored
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  It seems unlikely at best. Extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence. You haven't provided anything like that, merely a much more complex explanation than the obvious one.
  - iuyoiuyy 11y ago
    You can't pretend to have a high standard of evidence and yet never even consider any evidence that contradicts what you want to believe. Furthermore just because two masked men kills innocent people that does not imply anything about who commit the crime. Your "obvious" belief is only obvious because it's what you want to believe. All you have to do is look at what independent investigators like Chossudovsky have found and it immediately becomes clear it was a false flag.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      You condemn us for not considering evidence that contradicts what we want to believe, but you don't actually present any. Telling us to "look at what independent investigators like Chossudovsky have found" isn't much. Maybe a URL? Maybe more than one? Who are these people who are "like Chossudovsky"?
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        I've found that 'evidence please' is 9 times out of 10 to be a tactic to dismiss a point of view. Even when talking about facts that I can link to scientific peer reviewed papers, I am accustom to a request of evidence to indicate an attempt to call a bluff and not an actual desire to see evidence on an issue.
guelo 11y ago
The internet is a perfect surveillance machine. It is irresistible to those in power. I believe it shifts the balance of power towards the center more than it empowers distributed forces. For example, protesters have more tools to organize but governments have more tools to know what protesters are up to, they know where protesters will show up, how many and who they are. So there are no surprises. Overall advantage goes to the government. The Hong Kong protests probably would have sparked a revolution 20 years ago, but today they got nothing. As governments get better at this the internet will be a huge stabilizing force for power.
- dyoo1979 11y ago
  Does North Korea fit into your model? Why, or why not?
- tormeh 11y ago
  More importantly, modern telecommunications (internet etc.) are government/military infrastructure under government control and surveillance. Just like GPS etc. It's often hard to remember this and sometimes we even pretend that the internet is a place free of government control, which is delusional. The wires, cables and radio towers are under military control in any kind of crisis. It boils down to this: If you're a freedom fighter/terrorist on the internet then you're there because the government's cost-benefit analysis favours you being there. Sometimes that's as innocent as the government having principles, avoiding bad PR or collateral damage, but if you're allowed to be on the internet then you're either not quite dangerous enough or the government's too weak technically or politically to shut you down (not relevant for those in the semi-developed world).
  - cm2187 11y ago
    The thing with the internet is that governments are allowing themselves practices that have been long forbidden in the physical world, and for very good reasons. Whether the technology was initially a military technology is irrelevant. In most democracies, the state cannot open your mail or tap your phone without a warrant. But for some reason it's fair game to tap all your electronic communications. The sort of things that this law enables is nothing short of forcing all libraries, bookshops and newsagents to ask your ID when you pick a book or newspaper, keep records of what you read and send them to the state. Imagine how this would have gone in the sixties when you had strong political clashes in the society, whether it was leftists or social rights movements. I think the issue is that the cynicism and short-termism of French politicians is combined with a lack of understanding of the technology (even today that generation and social group barely uses internet) to form a perfect storm.
mturmon 11y ago
Mark Lilla has written a series of three articles that appeared in the New York Review that shed a lot of light on how very seriously the recent attacks have been taken in France, and incidentally predicted such a law would be passed. From the first article, written in February (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/mar/05/france-on-fire/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/mar/05/france-...): "[After the Prime Minister's speech], to the nation’s surprise, the deputies [in the French National Assembly] broke spontaneously and unanimously into the Marseillaise, the first time this had happened since the signing of the armistice ending World War I in 1918. "On the question of security, this unity is likely to last. There is a solid consensus that more resources will have to be devoted to tracking suspected terrorists and monitoring the Internet for signs of trouble. Legislation will be required to give the government sufficient legal leeway to accomplish that, which it will get, since all parties recognize the deficiencies yet none wants to reproduce the American Patriot Act." I had to read the article twice to begin to understand the French situation. There are parallels to the American case, but the French situation is unique, and in some ways more genuinely pressing than the American case. I urge the mostly American commenters here to not just draw the crude parallel and stop there. One point of difference is the special role the schools have, in France, of imparting a republican ideal. Another is the traditionally strong centralizing role of the national state in French schools, and culture more generally. And finally, there is the proximity, in all senses of the term, of France to North Africa.
- realusername 11y ago
  Thanks for linking to this article. As a French it's a good vision of the complex environment in France today. There is indeed some parallels with the US but the culture is so drastically different and the approach to all these events is in consequence not the same. I also see people talking about racism in this thread but even the notion of racism itself is absolutely not the same and cannot be compared. For outsiders, this article is a good introduction I guess.
- aikah 11y ago
  > how very seriously the recent attacks have been taken in France The laws that were passed have very little to do with the attacks. All people are saying is, if the executive power wants to spy, and they can already, they need a court order. Increasing executive powers without checks and balances only leads to tyranny and despotism. When Obama allows drone assassinations, he is killing in your name - assuming you are american. Today it's in Yemen, tomorrow in Canada, in 10 years in US ... These people that failed protecting us at first place don't need more power, they need less. And it's well known that you stop terrorism with human intelligence, not with spying everybody at the source.
arbitrage 11y ago
> "The last intelligence law was done in 1991, when there were neither cellphones nor Internet" Well, that's just downright untrue.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  But an understandable mistake. There was no web in 1991 and few people outside of academia would have been familiar with the internet. consumers were using the MiniTel system. Likewise very few people had cellphones. I remember that era quite well as I was spending a good bit of my time trying to explain the concept of email to people in suits and writing reviews of 2400 baud modems for computer magazines.
throwaway41597 11y ago
Does anyone know what the so-called "black boxes" look like? Do they bring a server into the datacenter and log traffic? Is it software they force companies to run on their servers? Is it only for telcos or also for websites?
javiramos 11y ago
Repeat of the 9/11 response in the US: Major Terrorist Attack -> Freak Out and Decide that Surveillance is the Solution -> Implement Surveillance -> Major Pushback Years Later from Individuals and Companies -> The story still unfolds...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
erazor42 11y ago
As a french, i'm ashamed of those (idiot/useless) politics
javajosh 11y ago
In France, as in the US, the legislature and judiciary exist to limit executive power. Once the judiciary gives away this power, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get it back. One would think it hardly needed to be mentioned, but these tools can be used against legislators, too.
zmanian 11y ago
I wonder if French law makers realize how much power they will inevitably be turning over to foreign intelligence services. French services has immense new legal authorities and permissive operating environment. They lack access to the financial resources and technical capacities of the NSA and GCHQ. It seems inevitable that French Services will invite in the NSA to make best use of their new legal authorities. Soon they will find that NSA's primary customers are able to get intelligence at will on internal French matters.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
This is disappointing news, not only for French people but also this is a trend in many countries. I am a huge fan of Katherine Austin Fitts (solari.com) and while she discusses this type of policy that is harmful to average people, she makes the good point that there is not much to be done about it so it is better adapt to a non optimal world in ways we can control: understanding how central banks and the financial systems work, understand governments' desire for population control, etc. I have mostly worked remotely as a consultant since 1997 and any prohibition against routine encryption would make it difficult for me to do business. I expect to see a trend where more small countries promote privacy and more secure non hacked by government infrastructure in an attempt at being more competitive, business wise.

184 points by mineshaftgap 11y ago

The US has a huge influence over other free nations, and has especially since WW2. They mimic the US, they take cues from the US in terms of what behavior is acceptable, they often expect the US to lead by example. In the two centuries prior to WW2, Europe was dominated by dictators and monarchies. Afterward, the entire region was remodeled on American style government representation, modern central banking, market economies and so on. Behaviorally for example, they followed the US into a global war on drugs that has been an epic failure, and fortunately they're going to follow the US back out of it too. They followed the US into a global war on terrorism, that mostly consists of cracking down on domestic freedom in the false name of security. The US isn't responsible for what France is doing, but the US is leading the so called free world down the wrong path.

kghose 11y ago
"The US isn't responsible for what France is doing" I hate this soft-pedalling. You should go all the way with anti-Americanism. Otherwise its just mealy mouthy.
- adventured 11y ago
  I'm the opposite of anti-American, and I don't appreciate the insult. What I said is factually correct.
yodsanklai 11y ago
> Behaviorally for example, they followed the US into a global war on drugs that has been an epic failure, and fortunately they're going to follow the US back out of it too. I noticed that popular US fictions show cannabis in a very good light. For instance, Sergent Baptista in Dexter smokes a joint in his car after work, and it's cool. Or Brody's teenage daughter in Homeland smoke weed with her friend, and although it's frowned upon, it's apparently not that big of a deal. And the list goes on... Eventually, I believe these fictions will lead to a better acceptation, and possibly legalization of cannabis in other countries (such as France) which are still very much opposed to it.
- adventured 11y ago
  The US will federally legalize marijuana in the next 10 to 20 years, that's almost a guarantee at this point. That'll tear down a lot of the global war on drugs, including a lot of financial & trade pressure systems that have been put into place to enforce it. As that happens - and we're already seeing it now - more countries will feel free to liberalize on drug policies, no longer fearing US reprisal or group-pressure tactics. France will be surrounded by countries that legalize or at least de-criminalize marijuana heavily, and they'll follow suit (they'll practically have to, whether they get out in front of it, or are dragged that direction by cultural forces greater than their own politics).
vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Afterward, the entire region was remodeled on American style government representation, modern central banking, market economies and so on. No, not really. The dominant form of government in Europe is the parliamentary republic (several at the backdrop of constitutional/ceremonial monarchies), compared to the more unique federalist model of the United States where there is a strict separation between the union and localities, and the President being the head executive as opposed to a Prime Minister. Europe was also quicker to apply mixed market principles and has generally been higher on the dirigisme aspect (even though the US is hardly some paragon of non-interventionism itself). Central banking was initially a European (British, I think?) invention.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > The dominant form of government in Europe is the parliamentary republic You mean "parliamentary democracy" (which is a subtype of representative democracy), not "parliamentary republic". "Republic" specifically means the absence of a monarch, which, as you note, is not a feature of many of the systems at issue. (Some, however, are republics, as well as parliamentary democracies.) > Central banking was initially a European (British, I think?) invention. The Bank of England wasn't the first central bank (Sweden, at least, had one first), though its often credited as being the dominant model for later central banks. It does seem to be a European invention.
  - walterbell 11y ago
    BIS (central bank of central banks) is based in Switzerland, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settleme...
  - icebraining 11y ago
    You mean "parliamentary democracy" (which is a subtype of representative democracy), not "parliamentary republic". "Republic" specifically means the absence of a monarch, which, as you note, is not a feature of many of the systems at issue. As far as I know, both are true; most European countries nowadays are republics. There are only 12 monarchies in Europe, and three (Andorra, Monaco and the Vatican) are micronations.
agumonkey 11y ago
Funny I talked about a U.S guy on a trip the other day, he said he wasn't in favor of security over liberty. By the time the U.S backpedal, the rest of the world will 'enjoy' false security measures.
anigbrowl 11y ago
Erm, I think you're being a little too US-centric here. In the two centuries prior to WW2, Europe was dominated by dictators and monarchies. Afterward, the entire region was remodeled on American style government representation, modern central banking, market economies and so on. France had a populist revolution around the same time as the US, then got swept up in Napoleonic dreams of empire, then got rid of Napoleon. The country is not reliant on the US for a political identity for for economic ideas - indeed France has long rejected the conventional wisdom of 'Anglo-Saxon capitalism'. As far as things like spying and surveillance go, the French have been doing that sort of thing for centuries. Get hold of a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses which is a a manual of psychological warfare and intrigue dressed up as a sexploitation story. Behaviorally for example, they followed the US into a global war on drugs that has been an epic failure, and fortunately they're going to follow the US back out of it too. To some extent, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that other countries had chips on their shoulders about drugs for their own reasons, eg China's experience int he opium wars of the 19th century has informed the attitudes of most SE Asian countries about drugs and goes a lot farther towards explaining their extremely hardline attitudes towards drug trafficking than US leadership in that area. I get the point you are trying to make, but I think you should broaden your historical perspective.

cognome 11y ago

Note that the nyt photo is misleading. The hémicycle was 3/4 empty when the law was voted. vote by pricuration.

analyst74 11y ago

Talking to friends lived or are still living in France, here are just some of the problems I heard: - in Paris, it's common to get robbed, and sometimes beaten up if you are not careful, and cops can do nothing. This is from a guy who went to school in Paris, I can't imagine what's it like to be a girl. - some of the non-French speaking neighbourhoods are quite dangerous, even cops would avoid going there for their own safety. - many people don't have ID, or use fake ID, so it's easy for criminals to get away. Those lawmakers might be inspired by their American counterparts, but they definitely have some level of local support.

yodsanklai 11y ago
> some of the non-French speaking neighbourhoods are quite dangerous there are no such thing as "non-French speaking neighborhoods" in France.
- smeyer 11y ago
  I'm an American who isn't very knowledgeable about France. Could you expand on this a little bit? There are definitely neighborhoods in the US where even if many people speak English, it's not the dominant language in the neighborhood. For example, places where more signs and labels on shops and such are in some other language than are in English. Are there no similar neighborhoods in France where another language dominates over French?
  - nraynaud 11y ago
    the biggest immigrant community in the US is Mexican so they have a common language that is Spanish. In France it's Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, where they all speak good french and a local dialect of arabic (let's say 60% french speaking people in all 3 countries, declining towards the local dialect), so it's easy to get the French as a common idiom. So you have many languages, but it's easier for everybody to use French anyways. On the food packages, the second most common language (often exactly the same size as the french) is ... Dutch ... Ok, we'll have to go north and speak about Belgium. Those packages are sold in all european French speaking countries (Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Belgium, in one day of trucking you can cross the area). Of those countries only Belgium and Switzerland have another language as official language, and only Belgium require to have both of it's national languages on its packaging (another story of bigotry for next time). One exception to the language distribution I talked about might be the Chinese community, being such a populous country, they can be enough immigrants in an area to avoid French altogether, I don't know them very well, they are very concentrated in small areas, and I don't know if they speak both mandarin and cantonese, or if the majority is from only one linguistic area. But I'm pretty sure the kids speak french at school, it's mandatory and in French here.

yodsanklai 11y ago

I'm wondering, is it possible to circumvent the surveillance, still enjoy a good internet experience, while not devoting too much resources? I suppose it starts with a VPN service. I use VPNs occasionally, but never in a systematic way. How convenient are they in term of reliability and performance? then, what about gmail? are there other email providers that offer better privacy guarantees and offer a comparable service?

nraynaud 11y ago
VPN will make you a target. That's the whole point of recording at the ISP level, the traffic is still quite individualized.
- higherpurpose 11y ago
  Saying "encryption makes you a target" represents a lack of understanding for how spy agencies monitor all communications. It's not like spy agency analysts target only some people and when they are in their offices and see some encrypted traffic from someone they go: "AHA! This guy uses encryption - let's monitor his (encrypted) communications and his metadata!" It's more like everyone's wide-open communications are monitored in real-time and automatically searched for keywords. Not using encryption makes you more exposed and vulnerable to mass surveillance, not less, because everything is exposed by default without encryption and everything is searched. It doesn't matter whether you're plotting an attack or "only talking about cats (therefore they can't possibly be interested in what I'm saying!)". It doesn't work like that, because there isn't a human that does the automatic searching, but software. To make it even simpler: it's like law enforcement saying "hmm, this guy put curtains on his windows - he must have something to hide! Let's watch him more closely to see where he's going when he leaves the house, and such" vs you going to law enforcement and giving them a daily report of what you've been doing, as well as full recordings of everything you talked about. Which is worse?
  - nraynaud 11y ago
    in that framework, consider that encryption is just a special keyword. And then they see that not a lot of people use it, then they have an opportunity to add just a bit more effort to those cases (maybe just storing the encrypted traffic), because there are so few.

fermigier 11y ago

This is a huge setback, both for democracy and for the french tech ecosystem. While the most preeminent french hosting and cloud providers (OVH, Online, Gandi, Alter Way...) have been quite vocal about the issue, none of the big french telcos (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) have said a single word about it. Shame on them! 900 tech companies, research organisations, and trade associations (so far) have asked the government to reconsider the law proposal (http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/en/ http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/en/), with not success, obviously. Several organisations I'm part of (including the two companies I have founded) where part of the movement, of course. There is still some hope that the law will be modified, by the french Senate, or that it will be censored by the french Constitutional Council, or the European Court of Human Rights. We also plan to start evangelising people on the use of VPNs.

fweespeech 11y ago
http://www.iliad.fr/en/ http://www.iliad.fr/en/ Online.NET is a big TelCo as well fyi. They own http://mobile.free.fr/ http://mobile.free.fr/ etc. But yeah, I've dropped my OVH/Online.net servers in favor of more Hetzner nodes with the exception of their S3 competitors [I just can't find any equivalent price/performance/availability]. That and I front end the S3 competitors anyway via a CDN over https which I think is fine with this legal framework [it just sniffs unencrypted traffic iirc] If you are making that kind of switch and are looking for bootstrapping automation for bare metal nodes at Hetzner: https://github.com/asconix/hetzner-bootstrap-coreos https://github.com/asconix/hetzner-bootstrap-coreos https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/leitmedium/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/leitmedium/hetzner-bootstrap https://github.com/RedMoonStudios/hetzner https://github.com/RedMoonStudios/hetzner
malka 11y ago
I plan to use VPN in area that are NOT friendly with the OTAN, such as Russia. I'd rather have Putin spy on me, than my own governement, or its allies. He has far less influence over my life, and I doubt that french and russian intelligence are cooperating.
- 11y ago

teamhappy 11y ago

It's going to be very interesting to hear their excuses for this kind of nonsense. By now we now it'll hurt the french population most. It'll hurt their economy second (I'm a big fan of Gandi, but that might change very soon), and it won't protect anybody either. I have hoped learning from the mistakes the US gov made after 9/11 would be the one good thing coming out of 9/11.

sans-culottes 11y ago
One would hope they would have learned. But France has always been a police state. The only difference is, now they are now openly admitting to it.
Qantourisc 11y ago
I'm a customer too, will be at least moving the server to a different data-centre soon. In terms of mail, I'm not sure what to do, I _DO_ know that you not only need to trust the transportation of your mail, but also the receiving end. I have know times, when using secure communication, only to have the receiver store the messages in the USA.

aikah 11y ago

"socialists" ... at that point if you vote PS you're a usefull idiot.

S4M 11y ago
I am politically on the right wing (in the French way), but Sarkozy is no better, honestly - amongst other things, he tried to push his then 19 years old son to become head of the administration managing the business area of La Defense (dealing with several billion of euros). I have no doubt he would have done the same as the PS is doing now would he be in power.
- aikah 11y ago
  I never said UMP is any better, in fact there is very little difference between both parties, aside from the Kabuki theater during the elections. The french political elite is rotten to the core. I'm left leaning by the way and I used to vote for these douche bags.

iuyoiuyy 11y ago

People need to wake up to the fact that many of these so-called terrorist attacks are in fact being done by the intelligence services, which is to say they are false flag operations, the sole purpose of them being to push through a far right wing agenda that involves surveillance, unending war and eventually Mass incarceration. http://www.globalresearch.ca/state-sponsored-terrorism-who-was-behind-the-charlie-hebdo-paris-attacks/5425322 http://www.globalresearch.ca/state-sponsored-terrorism-who-w... PS: this comment will likely be censored

matthewmacleod 11y ago
It seems unlikely at best. Extraordinary claims like this require extraordinary evidence. You haven't provided anything like that, merely a much more complex explanation than the obvious one.
- iuyoiuyy 11y ago
  You can't pretend to have a high standard of evidence and yet never even consider any evidence that contradicts what you want to believe. Furthermore just because two masked men kills innocent people that does not imply anything about who commit the crime. Your "obvious" belief is only obvious because it's what you want to believe. All you have to do is look at what independent investigators like Chossudovsky have found and it immediately becomes clear it was a false flag.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    You condemn us for not considering evidence that contradicts what we want to believe, but you don't actually present any. Telling us to "look at what independent investigators like Chossudovsky have found" isn't much. Maybe a URL? Maybe more than one? Who are these people who are "like Chossudovsky"?
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      I've found that 'evidence please' is 9 times out of 10 to be a tactic to dismiss a point of view. Even when talking about facts that I can link to scientific peer reviewed papers, I am accustom to a request of evidence to indicate an attempt to call a bluff and not an actual desire to see evidence on an issue.

guelo 11y ago

The internet is a perfect surveillance machine. It is irresistible to those in power. I believe it shifts the balance of power towards the center more than it empowers distributed forces. For example, protesters have more tools to organize but governments have more tools to know what protesters are up to, they know where protesters will show up, how many and who they are. So there are no surprises. Overall advantage goes to the government. The Hong Kong protests probably would have sparked a revolution 20 years ago, but today they got nothing. As governments get better at this the internet will be a huge stabilizing force for power.

dyoo1979 11y ago
Does North Korea fit into your model? Why, or why not?
tormeh 11y ago
More importantly, modern telecommunications (internet etc.) are government/military infrastructure under government control and surveillance. Just like GPS etc. It's often hard to remember this and sometimes we even pretend that the internet is a place free of government control, which is delusional. The wires, cables and radio towers are under military control in any kind of crisis. It boils down to this: If you're a freedom fighter/terrorist on the internet then you're there because the government's cost-benefit analysis favours you being there. Sometimes that's as innocent as the government having principles, avoiding bad PR or collateral damage, but if you're allowed to be on the internet then you're either not quite dangerous enough or the government's too weak technically or politically to shut you down (not relevant for those in the semi-developed world).
- cm2187 11y ago
  The thing with the internet is that governments are allowing themselves practices that have been long forbidden in the physical world, and for very good reasons. Whether the technology was initially a military technology is irrelevant. In most democracies, the state cannot open your mail or tap your phone without a warrant. But for some reason it's fair game to tap all your electronic communications. The sort of things that this law enables is nothing short of forcing all libraries, bookshops and newsagents to ask your ID when you pick a book or newspaper, keep records of what you read and send them to the state. Imagine how this would have gone in the sixties when you had strong political clashes in the society, whether it was leftists or social rights movements. I think the issue is that the cynicism and short-termism of French politicians is combined with a lack of understanding of the technology (even today that generation and social group barely uses internet) to form a perfect storm.

mturmon 11y ago

Mark Lilla has written a series of three articles that appeared in the New York Review that shed a lot of light on how very seriously the recent attacks have been taken in France, and incidentally predicted such a law would be passed. From the first article, written in February (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/mar/05/france-on-fire/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/mar/05/france-...): "[After the Prime Minister's speech], to the nation’s surprise, the deputies [in the French National Assembly] broke spontaneously and unanimously into the Marseillaise, the first time this had happened since the signing of the armistice ending World War I in 1918. "On the question of security, this unity is likely to last. There is a solid consensus that more resources will have to be devoted to tracking suspected terrorists and monitoring the Internet for signs of trouble. Legislation will be required to give the government sufficient legal leeway to accomplish that, which it will get, since all parties recognize the deficiencies yet none wants to reproduce the American Patriot Act." I had to read the article twice to begin to understand the French situation. There are parallels to the American case, but the French situation is unique, and in some ways more genuinely pressing than the American case. I urge the mostly American commenters here to not just draw the crude parallel and stop there. One point of difference is the special role the schools have, in France, of imparting a republican ideal. Another is the traditionally strong centralizing role of the national state in French schools, and culture more generally. And finally, there is the proximity, in all senses of the term, of France to North Africa.

realusername 11y ago
Thanks for linking to this article. As a French it's a good vision of the complex environment in France today. There is indeed some parallels with the US but the culture is so drastically different and the approach to all these events is in consequence not the same. I also see people talking about racism in this thread but even the notion of racism itself is absolutely not the same and cannot be compared. For outsiders, this article is a good introduction I guess.
aikah 11y ago
> how very seriously the recent attacks have been taken in France The laws that were passed have very little to do with the attacks. All people are saying is, if the executive power wants to spy, and they can already, they need a court order. Increasing executive powers without checks and balances only leads to tyranny and despotism. When Obama allows drone assassinations, he is killing in your name - assuming you are american. Today it's in Yemen, tomorrow in Canada, in 10 years in US ... These people that failed protecting us at first place don't need more power, they need less. And it's well known that you stop terrorism with human intelligence, not with spying everybody at the source.

arbitrage 11y ago

> "The last intelligence law was done in 1991, when there were neither cellphones nor Internet" Well, that's just downright untrue.

anigbrowl 11y ago
But an understandable mistake. There was no web in 1991 and few people outside of academia would have been familiar with the internet. consumers were using the MiniTel system. Likewise very few people had cellphones. I remember that era quite well as I was spending a good bit of my time trying to explain the concept of email to people in suits and writing reviews of 2400 baud modems for computer magazines.

throwaway41597 11y ago

Does anyone know what the so-called "black boxes" look like? Do they bring a server into the datacenter and log traffic? Is it software they force companies to run on their servers? Is it only for telcos or also for websites?

javiramos 11y ago

Repeat of the 9/11 response in the US: Major Terrorist Attack -> Freak Out and Decide that Surveillance is the Solution -> Implement Surveillance -> Major Pushback Years Later from Individuals and Companies -> The story still unfolds...

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erazor42 11y ago

As a french, i'm ashamed of those (idiot/useless) politics

javajosh 11y ago

In France, as in the US, the legislature and judiciary exist to limit executive power. Once the judiciary gives away this power, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get it back. One would think it hardly needed to be mentioned, but these tools can be used against legislators, too.

zmanian 11y ago

I wonder if French law makers realize how much power they will inevitably be turning over to foreign intelligence services. French services has immense new legal authorities and permissive operating environment. They lack access to the financial resources and technical capacities of the NSA and GCHQ. It seems inevitable that French Services will invite in the NSA to make best use of their new legal authorities. Soon they will find that NSA's primary customers are able to get intelligence at will on internal French matters.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

This is disappointing news, not only for French people but also this is a trend in many countries. I am a huge fan of Katherine Austin Fitts (solari.com) and while she discusses this type of policy that is harmful to average people, she makes the good point that there is not much to be done about it so it is better adapt to a non optimal world in ways we can control: understanding how central banks and the financial systems work, understand governments' desire for population control, etc. I have mostly worked remotely as a consultant since 1997 and any prohibition against routine encryption would make it difficult for me to do business. I expect to see a trend where more small countries promote privacy and more secure non hacked by government infrastructure in an attempt at being more competitive, business wise.