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France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

arstechnica.co.uk

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Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#111

Post by nickbauman »

GrumpyBen wrote: post #97
gotchange wrote: post #37

The French regime again showing its ugly authoritarian and statist face with these draconian bills. It wasn't enough for them to put environmentalists under house arrest and subject innocent people to humiliating mandatory reporting to different police stations 3 times a day or obligatory curfew for certain people or neighborhoods without any judicial oversight. [0] I knew it from the beginning that they would abuse…

The police found more than 300 illegal weapons during their searches. People that were put under house arrests have a file on them because of their links with terrorists or terrorist organizations. I don't feel the government is abusing the state of emergency, I just feel they should have done all this before the attacks.

A mere file? In the US, when a suspected terrorist is held by US state security and they are not a US citizen, every non-citizen in their social graph (family, friends, even known acquaintances) who aren't already being held are deported immediately.

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#112

Post by JHSheridan »

bvr22 wrote: post #57
mtgx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped "supporting France" after the Charlie Hebdo attack the moment I saw they were abusing that public support to push for more censorship and surveillance. Now they're looking at extending the emergency powers with very little oversight (by definition) indefinitely , all because the people showed "support" when the attacks happened. So I'm done playing their sick game. I hope more people (from France especially…

French guy here. Our government members are totally not looking to protect our liberties. Since the terrorists attacks on Nov13, more than 2500 police raids, at any hour in day or night, have taken place. Most of the time, they found nothing . La Quadrature du Net, a frnech association for online civil rights, tried to list some of the abuse here : https://wiki.laquadrature.net/%C3%89tat_urgence/Recensement (link in…

Do you have more info or a link on the Manuel Valls quote? I'm trying to find more context online, but having trouble.

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#113

Post by stefantalpalaru »

realusername wrote: post #24
rwmj wrote: post #5

All this because 130 people were killed. What would they do to prevent the 4600 people killed in road accidents in France last year? Or the 49000 people killed by alcohol [in 2009]?

And as far as I know, they did not use any encryption anyway, so I don't even see the point here, it's totally unrelated. Should we ban unencrypted connections then since that's what they used ?

Yes, they used plain SMS, but that's irrelevant. What matters for the policy makers is the propaganda.

A Belgian minister saw a PS4 console in a terrorist's room and concluded that the bad guys used the encrypted PS4 messaging system to communicate. The newspapers ran with it and this is the official narrative even today.

Guess who gets more funding to intercept more encrypted communication? And not just in France. Italy is joining the fun too, with the postal police getting new "terror watch" units that snoop on even more stuff to keep us safe.

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#115

Post by GrumpyBen »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #107
GrumpyBen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police found more than 300 illegal weapons during their searches. People that were put under house arrests have a file on them because of their links with terrorists or terrorist organizations. I don't feel the government is abusing the state of emergency, I just feel they should have done all this before the attacks.

> terrorist organizations Like those pesky ecologists that endanger the state by stopping economic growth and slowing down job creation at the cost of increased pollution, right?

They're not ecologists, they're anti-globalization anarchists that protested against a new airport by destroying shops in downtown Nantes. They recently threw at the police candles that people left at the memorial for the Paris attacks. I consider myself an ecologist but I have no sympathy for these people.

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#116

Post by jacquesm »

vonmoltke wrote: post #109
jacquesm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the wake of a terrorist attack, the public demands that laws be changed to make them safer. Ah, but therein lies a little problem: we probably can't be made safer and eventually this will become obvious to the general population as well. Terrorists have it super easy in soft bellied countries like the west. We have but two choices: change our societies drastically for the worse or accept the fact that complete s…

Unfortunately, when this dos become obvious to the general public the rhetoric will change from "we need this to keep you safe" to "we need this to minimize the danger to you". You can already see the shift in the talk after the recent attacks as the governments are trying to get ahead of this curve.

That has a very high probability of being true.

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#117

Post by ekianjo »

pmoriarty wrote: post #108
gotchange wrote: post #37

The French regime again showing its ugly authoritarian and statist face with these draconian bills. It wasn't enough for them to put environmentalists under house arrest and subject innocent people to humiliating mandatory reporting to different police stations 3 times a day or obligatory curfew for certain people or neighborhoods without any judicial oversight. [0] I knew it from the beginning that they would abuse…

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." -- Bertrand Russell But if you think this is something, wait until Le Pen comes to power. It's not just France either. Authoritarianism is rife in much of the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, for that matter. France is a particularly interesting case, however. As on the one hand th…

Dont make me laugh. The revolutionaries were talking about fraternity while chopping heads by the 100 000s. Study your History my friend. France has always had an authoritarian face.

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#118

Post by [deleted] »

mcansky wrote: post #91
acd wrote: post #85

West will not win against crazy groups by reimplementing the great firewall of China. If the state wants to control our lifes, they should have real time access to credit card and phone data. One main issue is religions and that it turns people against each other due to different beliefs.

no book of religion pushes people to grab a knife or a gun to harm others; crazy leaders do and unstable and uneducated people follow. yet, even if we discard that previous point : forbidding religions would be exactly the same as creating one and pointing "believers" as enemies of "non believers" ... triggering more of what you try to stop general education and broad tolerance between cultures (either religious or n…

[deleted]

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#119

Post by Lawtonfogle »

nickbauman wrote: post #111
GrumpyBen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The police found more than 300 illegal weapons during their searches. People that were put under house arrests have a file on them because of their links with terrorists or terrorist organizations. I don't feel the government is abusing the state of emergency, I just feel they should have done all this before the attacks.

A mere file? In the US, when a suspected terrorist is held by US state security and they are not a US citizen, every non-citizen in their social graph (family, friends, even known acquaintances) who aren't already being held are deported immediately.

I've never heard of this. Does this policy have a name I could read up on?

Re: France looking at banning Tor, blocking public Wi-Fi

#120

Post by Lawtonfogle »

jacquesm wrote: post #46
paulddraper wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more cynical view is that the government perpetrates the attack to provide the opportunity, ala 9/11 conspiracy theories.

I don't subscribe to that view. There is enough misery in the world that you can always find a suitable event without having to concoct your own. All it takes is the press to magnify an event out of proportion and voila: instant crisis.

There is enough evidence that, while not directly performing attacks, they have considered doing such and engage in behaviors that encourage such attacks. For example, look at the FBI radicalizing individuals and convince them to carry out attacks. Even though the FBI works to make the actual attack a fake, they have created a dangerous individual who may switch to carrying out an attack. And this isn't even considering the things the CIA has done. I see no reason why the US would be alone in these horrors.
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