
France Has A PRISM-Like Program With Thousands Of Trillions Of Metadata Elements - pirri
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/04/france-has-a-prism-like-program-with-thousands-of-trillions-of-metadata-elements/
======
Aissen
Non-blog-spam story by the french newspaper that outed it:
[http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2013/07/04/revelations...](http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2013/07/04/revelations-
on-the-french-big-brother_3442665_3224.html)

~~~
greyman
Why are you calling it blog-spam? They rewrote the story to readable English
and offered it to the Tech community. (Who reads Le Monde? ;-));

~~~
sentenza
Le Monde is actually quite good. I try to keep a multi-angle view of politics
in Europe, so I frequent a few newspapers/sites from different European
countries. After shopping around a bit, I settled for Le Monde as the IMO best
among the French daily newspapers.

~~~
ekianjo
> The best among French Daily newspapers

Seeing how crappy the french daily newspapers are, that's a pretty meaningless
claim. Over the past few years most of the "quotidiens" have been doing
nothing more than rewriting the AFP reports. They don't do investigative
journalism anymore, and even the published articles are full of spelling
mistakes, something you didn't see 20-30 years ago.

The level has dropped significantly for the press in France, and that's also
why no one buys them anymore. All these french newspapers are heavily State-
subsidized for survival. Let's not wonder a second about their independence.

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azinman2
Of course they are, because if you could, why wouldn't you? The potential is
too useful for anyone in power to not exploit.

I love the hypocrisy of French politicians at being outraged at PRISM and
wanting to offer asylum to Snowden, when they're doing the same shit.

~~~
speeder
The politicians that want to offer asylum are also against this.

The politicians that like this thing, are the same ones that stopped Evo
Morales plane thinking Snowden would be on it.

~~~
eatmyshorts
They thought Snowden was on the Morales' plane because of the intel they
received from the bugs they planted in the Ecuadorian embassy in London that
were found weeks ago. The Ecuadorians announced they discovered the bugs
within 24 hours of the forced landing of Morales' plane.

~~~
glitchdout
Source, please?

~~~
eatmyshorts
The connection between the bug and Snowden is pure speculation on my part. But
here's a link to an article about the bug.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23179431](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23179431)

I just find it a little coincidental that Snowden is working with Wikileaks,
which is led by Assange, who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, where news
has just been uncovered that they discovered a bug a few weeks ago, and that
this news was released within 24 hours of the diversion of Morales' plane.

Personally, I think the news release of the bug was intended to send a message
to the US & UK intelligence services.

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tzs
I suspect that the only countries that are NOT secretly doing something like
this fall into two groups:

• Those who make no secret of it.

• Those who don't have the technology to do it.

~~~
eatmyshorts
And the Germans. The Germans haven't been party to most of the post-WWII
spying, if I understand geopolitics correctly.

~~~
tptacek
Where did you get that idea? Germany spends something like half a billion
every year on signals intelligence.

~~~
eatmyshorts
It's all relative. The US spends some $75 billion:
[http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-
surveillanc...](http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/07/news/economy/nsa-surveillance-
cost/index.html) . I don't think Germany's budget will go a long way towards
sweeping up global communications and analyzing them.

~~~
tptacek
They also spend on their military a tiny fraction of what we spend on ours.
Would you thus claim that there's no German army?

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ipsin
The phrasing is that much more confusing because France is a long scale
country, so "one thousand trillion" is the valid way to say 10^21. If 1 byte =
1 metadata element (unlikely), that's a zettabyte. Which is probably not
what's meant.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales)

~~~
chebucto
The headline of TFA says "Millions Of Trillions"

The headline of TFA's TFA (the source article) says

"La DGSE collecte ainsi des milliards de milliards de données".

That translates to 'millions of millions' pieces of data, or on the order of
10^12 (trillions in short scale) pieces of data.

~~~
bnegreve
No 'milliards de milliards' translates to billions of billions. So that would
be 10^18

~~~
IanCal
Could this be translated as "billions and billions" or "billions upon
billions"?

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dendory
Literally it says billions of billions, but in context it most likely means
billions upon billions.

~~~
mortehu
Why? Petabytes seems like a more likely order of magnitude than gigabytes,
doesn't it?

 _eta_ : From the article: "capable of managing dozens of petaoctets of data,
in other words dozens of millions of gigaoctets"

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agravier
Previous discussion of the topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990016](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5990016)

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logn
Thousands of trillions? At what point do we start expressing numbers in terms
of the number of known atoms in the universe? This is big data. Civil
liberties aside, this is awesome.

I'd express this as .19, or 15/78 due to the French dataset containing 10^15
and the number of atoms in the universe, at a speculated lower bound, being
10^78.

The one good thing that could come of all this surveillance, maybe we get a
better version of Sim City that actually does need cloud computing.

------
DigitalSea
Isn't it obvious to everyone by now? We have to wake up, basically every
developed country has a program like PRISM that varies but the whole premise
of capturing information isn't anything new. This is something that the US and
other countries have been doing since World War 2 in some shape or form.

I could easily write a script in Python through some crafty Google searches,
the Facebook API, Twitter API, LinkedIn and simple scraping could compile a
report of a person and or persons activity on the Internet throw in some
natural language processing and I could paint a vague but nonetheless somewhat
accurate representation of a person. Capturing phone meta data and tracking
locations via cell phone towers would obviously only be only something those
supplied with such information would be able to store and have access to.

The difference between a surveillance scraping network that infringes upon
your privacy and one that walks the grey line very closely is what information
it is given. The technology behind PRISM like programs is largely the same,
perhaps fluctuations in how fast information can be retrieved, sorted, tagged
and stored are the only difference.

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dguido
I think the surprising part about this is the following statement: "The DGSE
entirely designed the program and no data protection representative is
overseeing it." I differentiate between these programs more with "It's not
what you collect, it's how you use it." :-)

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phy6
Also known as quadrillions.

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mtarnovan
Holy millions of trillions, Batman !

(later edit: with all due respect for the seriousness of the topic, I loled
when I read the title; seems like the submitter also noticed the alliteration
and changed it to "thousands of trillions", which made me laugh again)

~~~
speeder
post-napoleon french number system is quite... peculiar.

Some places kept pre-revolution French (like Switzerland) and there they use
"normal" numbers (ie: 79 is seventy nine, instead of sixty ten nine, and 84 is
eighty four instead of four twenty and four)

~~~
nisse72
"Normal" according to who? :-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemvigesimal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septemvigesimal)

And then there's Danish...

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touristtam
I recall reading on a newsgroup sometimes in 2001 (prolly long lost since
then) that the french internet was being monitored by french the government.
So kind of old news to me.

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reeses
With all this talk about metadata, it would be wonderful if these agencies
published and standardized their ontologies.

