France legalizes remote camera and microphone activation in smartphones • Hacker News Board

Re: France legalizes remote camera and microphone activation in smartphones

#121

Post by sebstefan » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

soco wrote: post #120

sebstefan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are right that I'm not French, I'm Swiss and we have 5 years longer until pension. I would love to have solutions which can keep it as low as in France, but I must wonder, how come no other country in the world (except Greece, which defaulted) was able to apply them already? You can check the government report on which everything in this pension reform is based on https://www.lexpress.fr/economie/retraites-ce-q…

Well then the solution was right there and you say people would go on the streets just as well. A complex but working system of three pillars of pensions vs depending completely on the state with one single pillar, that's the difference between pragmatism and magical thinking.

You do realize we go on the streets for everything?

>magical thinking.

Why do you feel the need to contribute to topics you know nothing about

The data is right there: the system was not in a deficit that warranted any drastic action. You're stuck in a swiss "medicine should taste bad" mentality. You fetishized centrism to such a level you're mistaking it for wisdom

Re: France legalizes remote camera and microphone activation in smartphones

#122

Post by cultureswitch » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #45

krzys wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those privacy-breaching bills are for the safety of the government, not citizens.

Having worked in law enforcement, seeing sentiment like this is just so depressing. On one side it's people saying things like this, while on the other side a large part is complaining about law enforcement not doing enough to combat cyber crime. These things go hand in hand. If criminals can have limitless access to new technologies, but LE gets no new ways of finding criminals using new technologies, we might as we…

Not much would happen at all. Criminals don't endanger democracy, laws like this do.

Crime rates in countries similar to France are absurdly low compared to any other time in history. And that's ignoring the fact that the definition of "criminal" is also expanding very quickly. Why is that? We're also putting much fewer people in prison, so it's not like law enforcement is just catching more.

Crime that happens exclusively online is crime that law enforcement is the least apt to deal with, but not because of technology. Before the Internet, police very rarely caught scammers, and that's the bread and butter of online crime. The best line of defense against that is in the individual.

If you think all this is justified by terrorism then I beg to differ. Acts of terrorism in France are a response against the overwhelming power projection of NATO. It's the poor man's way of waging war. But what does it really accomplish? Not much at all, other than provide an excuse for authoritarian measures.

And finally, law enforcement doesn't need any technology to bag the obvious corruption, money laundering and fiscal evasion going on among the rich and connected. Those crimes are far more damaging as they eat away at the fabric of society. You don't need technology to deal with those however, you'd just need to be allowed to do something by the same masters that vote for this.

Re: France legalizes remote camera and microphone activation in smartphones

#123

Post by cultureswitch » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 3:21 PM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #104

Fradow wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general sentiment is that law enforcement is able to work well enough without being given the right to infringe on any citizens privacy unchecked (and by that I mean without a court order or minimal oversight). In this case, it's with a court order, but the real issue is that it mandates having backdoors, something pretty much everyone with a lick of understanding of what it entails is strongly against.

> the real issue is that it mandates having backdoors I'm seeing this response in many replies to mine and I feel like this is because people don't understand how laws like this actually work. Especially because people in the US like to apply their mistrust of LE to European LE. The Netherlands already has a law in place allowing police to hack citizens in case of specific crimes, comparable to this law in France. Th…

> HN then has the tendency to say "for now", implying that this will soon be applied to petty thieves and the general populace, but this law doesn't allow that, has many safeguards and therefore that doesn't happen.

Institutional safeguards are the most miserable line of defense. The moment there's political will to make them go away, that happens instantly. Look at what happened to a formerly democratic country such as Turkey.