Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

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.

???

Do you know what the area this friend spoke of was ???

Serious question.

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?

- there is a lot of criminality in Paris and suburbs, but I have been robbed only once, in a real shithole. There is a lot of white collar criminality too.

- there are no non-french neighborhood, most people have french citizenship, most immigrants are from a french speaking country, and even inside a high immigration area, since people are coming from different countries, french language still serves as a communication tool. You will find a foreign language inside a family, sometimes the women won't speak french, but certainly not an entire neighborhood (you will definitely hear some foreign languages in the streets). And contrary to popular belief, almost nobody speaks natively arabic, you will find popular arabic courses (because speaking arabic looks cool in somme communities, and for reading the koran), but very few native speakers.

- I'd be very interested in detailed stories of non-white looking people not carrying an ID in France, last time I heard of a brown guy not having an ID it was in the news because the guy was released in appeal: "looking north african does not constitute a reasonable suspicion" (first time ever in France that a racist targeting derails a procedure). It gives you the tonality of the police here. If's you're not white, don't drive a luxury car, you'll get harassed.

Don't go out without an ID if you're not white in France, never. They can and will detain you for 4h without any suspicion of crime. Since it's not a criminal procedure, you'll have no lawyer.

I'm white, I always go out without an ID, because of white privilege, but my mixed race nephew doesn't have that luxury.

(street cred: I lived in a Paris suburb from birth to 18yo, in a shitty area, then I considered my debt to society repaid and I lived everywhere but Paris)