
France's Government Aims to Give Itself Carte Blanche to Spy on the World - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/frances-government-aims-give-itself-and-nsa-carte-blanche-spy-world
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tajen
Disclosure: I'm French.

The EFF is complaining that we are lowering what amounts to be the Human
Rights, and they are right. However the EFF hasn't succeeded in taming the US
standard.

What may be happening here is pressure for an international agreement. We'll
only have leverage to make a deal with the US if we (the rest of the world)
practice the same disrespectful spy acts against innocent American citizen.
Then we can agree on stopping our activities in a bilateral or UN agreement.

Of course what is funny about threats from my country is that we are quite
powerless. We don't have the world's Facebook records, neither do we manage
the world's largest email. With this kind of law, chances are we won't. I, for
one, host my email neither in France nor in US.

For this threat to be leveraged against US, a lot of other countries have to
do the same, until there's a major uprising against surveillance methods.

The world has changed. 20 years ago, the right to not be searched when
traveling within a country was enough to protect most citizen. Now all citizen
cross boarders once a year or use remote Internet websites, which in both
cases dismisses their rights as citizen. We need a global protection against
unwarranted searches.

~~~
dannyobrien
Hi, I'm the author of the piece. What you describe, while astute, isn't what's
going on here, because at the level these agreements are being made, the
French intelligence services don't care that the NSA is spying on French
nationals. There's no negotiation to be made: they simply want to maintain
their existing capacity, but have been required to give it legal cover by the
greater recent visibility of mass surveillance. In fact, among intelligence
services of putative allies, having another friendly nation spy on your
nationals grants you a potential advantage, since it means you can bypass
domestic restrictions by simply trading intel with them. (It's also one of the
reasons why bilateral agreements would be undermined, and difficult to
initiate. They would also preserve the idea that some classes of innocent
users are fair game for mass surveillance, while others deserve protection.)

France's surveillance advantage comes from its access to submarine cables
rather than local servers. That's the information it will be collecting, and
potentially trading with others.

Much of the problem here, I'd note, comes from not separating the defensive
and offensive components of the intelligence services. Whatever you belief is
the proportionate level of surveillance of a population, it's clear that an
institution whose job was to protect the assets and personal data of a
nation's population would have a very different attitude to letting others spy
on its comma traffic than one which was primarily concerned with aggressively
investigating other nations. Politicians are therefore hearing policy
proposals from only one side of a debate. That's why they think that backdoors
would help and not harm national security, and why they think spying on the
rest of the world without oversight won't erode their own citizens' privacy.

~~~
mtgx
I agree. The NSA/US gov could care less that France will spy on its citizens.
For all we know they may already have a deal to do _exactly that_ to bypass
some of NSA's own restrictions of spying on Americans.

I think it's already known they do that with the GCHQ. And they make European
countries spy on each other, too, while they promise them not to spy on them
_themselves_ , but then get the data from others. Sweden spies on Germany,
Germany spies on Sweden - and NSA gets all of that data.

From everything they've said and done so far, it's also clear the NSA would
rather _maintain_ the status quo of an insecure Internet and insecure
computers, backdoored encryption and whatnot, _even_ if the US has the "most"
to lose, as long as they can use that insecurity to spy on others, too. They
much rather prefer this scenario than if say 99% of the global population were
all using end-to-end encryption and let's say Qubes OS.

This seems exactly backwards for a national "security" agency, especially with
all of their recent calls for increased "cybersecurity", but there you go.

~~~
happyscrappy
The NSA makes the Swedes spy on the Germans? Is there any way they can get
control of their country back? And why would they even need to when Germany is
littered with US military bases?

------
raindev
> The United States makes an improper division between surveillance conducted
> on residents of the United States, and the surveillance that is conducted
> with almost no restraint upon the rest of the world.

> Treating two sets of innocent targets differently is already a violation of
> international human rights law.

It was bothering me for quite a while. I'm not an American. So what? I have
lesser privacy rights?! Am I lesser human? Is spying okay as long as it's not
spying on you?

~~~
x5n1
All countries should create their own facebooks and invite Americans to join
theirs. It's sort of stupid to allow Facebook into any country unless all of
its business operations and servers are based in the said country with proper
controls. Even then that does not preclude the US government forcing Facebook
to turn over data on Non-US citizens to itself.

Facebook is the #1 vector of US government's indiscriminate spying on
everybody's else's citizens. Google comes a close second, but you don't
generally give Google as many personal details as you give to Facebook. At
least not by your own free will.

And that's really the problem that France has, everyone uses American services
so America can basically create a dossier on everyone. No one uses French
services other than French citizens, and perhaps a few other souls.

~~~
morgante
So you're basically suggesting that every country should build their own Great
Firewall?

Whose side are you on?

~~~
geomark
Already in proposal stage in many places. My current home, Thailand, just
announced plans for their own version. I am not amused.

However, hilarity has already ensued. The gov here is so incompetent that they
couldn't even make an annoucement without having a bunch of gov websites taken
down by a _manual_ DDOS attack yesterday [1]. A few thousand people
coordinated via social media to repeatedly visit the gov's ICT website which
brought it to a standstill. Yet the gov thinks they can manage a single
internet gateway to facilitate surveillance and it won't be ruinous.

[1] [http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/714432/single-
gatewa...](http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/714432/single-gateway-
protest-halts-government-websites)

------
Intermernet
I love the EFF, but honestly, I'm not sure what they can do about this, other
than educate and inform.

The US, the rest of the Five Eyes, France, China, Russia, along with every
state that has the ability has been, and will continue to spy _illegally_ on
the rest of the world.

Passing laws to either allow or prohibit this activity is nothing but
political posing so long as the laws have no determination on the penalties
applied to breaking said laws.

Did Clapper get imprisoned for lying to congress?

Did Litvinenko get a fair trial for "exceeding the authority of his position"?

Does anyone believe that Snowden would get fair treatment from an unbiased
jury?

This is the theater of international espionage. Without transparency, honesty
and consistency, complaining about the laws, or lack thereof, is pretty much a
waste of time.

Or maybe I'm just overly cynical and we'll eventually get an Erin Brokovich of
international espionage to blow the lid off the whole deal and hold the
bastards accountable.

I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
rihegher
French here,

I've been a web developper for more than 15 years now and I try to follow
what's going on with digital laws in France and Europe thanks to "la
quadrature du net". I try to inform people around me but most people don't
have any interest in digital laws, because 1) most medias don't talk about it
or in a caricatural way. 2) People and most member of parliament don't
undestand these laws. 3) Lobbys knows 1) and 2) The results is that any
digital law bills can be passed along easily as long as it doesn't disturb any
strong lobbys in place as media won't talk about it and people and member of
parliament won't speak up anyway.

Those who understand why these laws could turn very bad are a really small
minority, and small minority without lobby means can be very badly represented
in a democracy. Honestly I lack imagination to think of something more to do
that could make significant change here.

------
KaiserPro
Don't worry, here in the UK we just went ahead and spied on everyone and
ignored the legal ruling.

Everything is secret, using laws lets the terrorist and paedophiles win. (to
summarise what the home secretary says on the matter.)

~~~
nmc
Actually this is the same thing in France.

The bill is simply aimed at "legalizing" practices that have been going on for
years. Also, since the Snowden leaks, some actors have started to question the
legality of some practices, and this bill would address those concerns.

For instance, French secret services used to be able to get phone records for
someone by simply calling the phone company; now, phone companies are feeling
uneasy about the lack of legal frame for these practices.

------
ivanhoe
I think it's pretty safe to presume that all countries are doing it already,
within their technical capabilities. I'm also pretty sure they will continue
to do it, regardless of any local or international laws, simply because today
information means power, and I can't imagine that any government would be
ready to just let it slip out of their hands.

~~~
geomark
Yep. And some are dumb enough to announce they are doing it,
[http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/714432/single-
gatewa...](http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/714432/single-gateway-
protest-halts-government-websites)

------
bsaul
I know it's easy, but i can't help remember that every single terrorist that
striked in the last years in france were already identified by security
services, and for a very long time.

For what i know, the problem in France seems to be much further down the data
pipe, aka not enough (competent) humans analysing the threat data. I very much
doubt flooding those services with an even bigger stream of information will
help in any way.

------
wahsd
Hell, why shouldn't they. The USA has already done it, why not them too. Maybe
there is actually even some sort of kind of MAD principle in that concept. I
don't really see how it would end up well, but it at least has a chance of a
positive outcome relative to the USA dominating and spying on the world
unilaterally.

I guess the ideal situation would be a transglobal civil intelligence corp
that hacks and publicly publishes the secrets of governments their officials
and corporations. A crowd-sourced intelligence organization that tracks public
figures and agents and activities across the globe.

------
mtgx
> The original surveillance law included limits on data retention when spying
> on French nationals (30 days for the content of communications, four years
> for metadata, six years for encrypted data). The new international limits
> are much longer—one year, six years, and eight years respectively.

I can't imagine any of that will be allowed by the EU Justice Court. Now who's
going to sue the French government?

The EUCJ is also going to rule on Europe vs Facebook case next week, which
will affect the EU-US Safe Harbor agreement as well, and possibly some of
these new spying laws in the EU. I can't wait (I think it will be a positive
ruling).

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1024core
The US, UK, etc. are doing this anyways; why not the French? Let the spying
race begin.

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TurboHaskal
That explains the cheese and wine ads.

