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Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

nytimes.com

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Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#51

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

fermigier wrote: post #19

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…

my company is also registered here doing business mainly with mentioned Telcos.

One thing which I'm wondering is how can this go ahead if they want to stay aligned with EU regulation. Wouldn't such a move automatically violate the "Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC" ? [0]

If this moves forward I'll move the company to Germany because giving any more tax-Euros to such a government would feel like supporting a Stasi like apparatus. Also if this gets implemented then good luck for the future when Marie Le Pen's far right government gains further power in this economy (and they will because France is doing too little too late to recover from the mess they're in).

Also the standardization body (ETSI) which does a lot of the global technical specs (3gpp) for mobile and M2M is keeping quiet on the topic of building privacy into the standards. I have brought up the lack of privacy focus in several work groups but somehow this is not a topic that gets addressed at all. Mentioned chairmen are of course deeply ingrained in the telco industry which again is in bed with government. And from a sales/marketing perspective it's easier to build/sell features such as Lawful Interception (LI) or Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) rather than a product which refuses to do something (such as pass on private data)

The Charlie Hebdo team would turn in their graves if they'd know what kind of aftermath their deaths caused. It makes me sick beyond words.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#52

Post by mike_hearn »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #36
iuyoiuyy wrote: post #33

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-w... PS: this comment will like…

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.

Well, it's been established beyond doubt that in the USA the FBI basically creates terrorists by finding angry people and putting bombs in their hands (and ensures that they complete the plot that was invented for them, even if they wouldn't have been able to do it themselves). They then use the prevalence of terrorism to justify new powers.

That's pretty damn close to what iuyoiuyy is talking about. Razor thin distinction between FBI and intelligence agencies excepted.

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#54

Post by drzaiusapelord »

malka wrote: post #25
fermigier wrote: post #19

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…

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.

>and I doubt that french and russian intelligence are cooperating.

You guys build warships for Putin's war machine which is murdering civilians in Ukraine, something the French knew they were going to empower someday with arms like these. You don't buy helicarriers for defense, you buy them to easily attack your neighbors. Ties between these two nations go back hundreds of years. I would absolutely not assume the FSB and DGSE/DGSI aren't talking. I would assume they are bosom buddies.

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#55

Post by throwaway41597 »

fermigier wrote: post #19

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…

The part about black boxes (L851-4) expires on December 31st, 2018. So if companies complain enough by then, there is also hope that it won't be renewed. But it'd be better for the courts to reject it like you said.

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#56

Post by AnimalMuppet »

iuyoiuyy wrote: post #38
matthewmacleod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 fo…

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"?

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#57

Post by pgeorgi »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #51
fermigier wrote: post #19

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…

my company is also registered here doing business mainly with mentioned Telcos. One thing which I'm wondering is how can this go ahead if they want to stay aligned with EU regulation. Wouldn't such a move automatically violate the "Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC" ? [0] If this moves forward I'll move the company to Germany because giving any more tax-Euros to such a government would feel like supporting a Stasi l…

Why would ETSI endanger its mission by making privacy a priority? http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_es/201600_201699/201671/01.... ("Handover interface for the lawful interception of telecommunications traffic")

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#59

Post by tomjen3 »

nraynaud wrote: post #24
higherpurpose wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

That is okay. I stream Spotify through a VPN try to break that much traffic only to find my playlist.

Re: Lawmakers in France Move to Vastly Expand Surveillance

#60

Post by anigbrowl »

iuyoiuyy wrote: post #38
matthewmacleod wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 fo…

No it doesn't. There are certainly some weird coincidences that are worthy of further investigation. But in any dramatic news event that touches the lives of a lot of people, there tend to be some weird coincidences. Many of them turn out to mean nothing at all. While one shouldn't dismiss things on that basis - because the fact that something seems highly improbable may well mean it is worthy of further scrutiny - one shouldn't uncritically accept them as fact on the mere basis of their improbability.

Look at the Germanwings plane crash that happened recently. At first a lot of people were convinced that the action had been carried out by radical Islamists, because such people have a track record of that sort of activity and terrorism in general in recent years.When it turned out to be a white German guy, some people were sure that he was a recent convert to Islam or something - which was a possibility worthy of consideration but not of certitude. When it further turned out that he was a neurotic and depressed guy going through anxiety about his eyesight and the impact that it might have on his career, a few of the people who really really believed int he Islamic terrorist idea started talking about how it was a big cover-up. It's possible they're right, but it's much more likely that they're just imagining it.

I agree that it's possible that this is a false flag operation. The French security services have crossed the line into unethical behavior on previous occasions. There's also a high degree of xenophobia in French culture for various socioeconomic reasons, and in difficult economic times (like now) it's certainly more politically convenient to whip up anxiety about wicked foreigners than to take up the politically unpalatable task of structural reform. Thus, the motivation to carry out false flag operations certainly exist.

But motivation isn't evidence. Otherwise you could take my bank statements and say 'oh, you had a mediocre economic situation lately, I guess you had motivation to rob that bank last week, didn't you? Didn't you?!' And so on. It's good to be skeptical and examine inconsistencies or oddities in the way news stories are reported. But reasoning from the existence of such things to a firm conclusion about what happened can be just as misleading as unquestioning acceptance of claims by authority figures. For one thing, it depends on the false premise that people in authority never make stupid mistakes, so that if they say something which later turns out not to be true, it must be because they were lying. In fact, people in authority are just as prone to jumping to conclusions, making mistakes, forgetting things, and saying whatever bullshit they think people want to hear as everyone else. So while they sometimes do lie, you should at least consider the possibility of simple incompetence first.

Don't fall into the trap of swapping one kind of credulity for another.

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