As far as I know, the title is wrong, only the senate approved the bill. That's not enough for France to legalize anything
The way it works in France is there's two chambers of parliament, the senate and the Assemblée nationale (that I translate to "the parliament"). Unless the law changes something in the constitution, the senate is just there to advise the parliament. If they'd voted no, it wouldn't have mattered.
It is up to the parliament to vote laws into effect
But the neolib right, the far-right and the conservative right compose >60% of the parliament so there's no need to hold your horses too much. For the retirement law, they didn't have the support of the far-right. Since I don't think the far-right is going to suddenly find themselves privacy lovers I think we can safely assume it'll go through
Parliament certainly didn't stop Macron from pushing threw the pension reform against the will of virtually everyone. It's a pity that most of the media doesn't cover the legitimate concerns of the french population.
Yep even if it goes through the parliament they can avoid a vote
Then the parliament can whip out a motion of non-confidence, which, if signed by 50% of the parliament, removes the law and fires the government.
Stress on the "signed by 50% of the parliament" => If a congressman doesn't sign it, it's counted as a no. They almost never go through. Not to mention that a fair number of congressmen can be against a law, but also against firing the government. So by definition they always have that advantage on these votes too
The french population is indeed concerned by the increasing of the pension age, but not concerned at all with the price paid by their own children for not increasing it. So I wouldn't call the concerns of the population necessarily legitimate, as present and pressing as they might be.
People online assume too much with the french pension reform
Government reports forecasted a possible deficit that was in the ranges of €10bn in 10+ years, which is tiny, along with other predictions that put it lower and even predicted profits. Uncertainty's equal across any of them
Many alternatives were brought up by either the opposition and various economists; reducing pensions, increasing dues, pointing out new/other sources of income, ... many of them coming from right-wing political commentators. It was a trainwreck across the board. Then the government politely declined all suggestions without much in the way of arguments and pushed the reform over the parliament
You don't get all the major unions, including the ones that are basically carpets, to call for a strike for a pension reform if it's legitimate. Nor do you get 93% of the working population to disagree with you. We have pension reforms every 5 years or so and while they usually cause some forms of strikes, we never get 3+million people in the streets for something like that. If you were french you'd be pissed off. But you're not, so you just followed the story through the prism of foreign news and they often can't afford to go super in-depth
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?
I'll take only one idea from above: I imagine the same people would go on the same streets if their pensions would be reduced, and by the way, even today you can retire earlier with a reduced pension - so I totally miss this point. Same for increasing dues - one can simply put more money aside any time.
> 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
Article fails to mention covid killing off a bunch of old people but the timing of that helped too.
We don't do capitalized pensions aka "putting money aside" and we don't want to. We pay for the currently retired with the dues of those currently working in real time
Some of the same people would show up in the streets for reduced pensions or increased dues if it came down to a deficit (which isn't the case right now), but nothing like May
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
There is a lot more immediate causes for the drop of living standards in France than the pension reform. Virtue signaling at the expense of the french people, nepotism corruption and Macron selling off critical infrastructure among them.
However I don't see the people going on the streets for those points you mentioned here, but only for the increased age of retirement. What safety will they have that, if the pension age stays as such (and they defeated Macron yay), the nepotism and corruption and all that will not continue? Going on the street is a great weapon and I admire it, but in this particular case I think it's going after the wrong end of the problem (which you seem to recognize as well).
But if the public is ok with paying this despite the increasing cost, why block them?
France has some of the best welfare in the world and from what I hear from my French friends they're not opposed to paying for it, unlike more neoliberal countries where tax is a swear word.
The public isn't ok with paying for it though. They only want to receive it. The yellow vests were protesting a level of taxation that couldn't sustain the pensions, let alone one that can.
For someone who is unfamiliar with French law, is the parliament able to propose legislature (either by advocating in the senate or by pushing up to the senate)? Or do they only determine / vote on what becomes law?
I checked a translation dictonary. Apparently it means crimes in general. I found a French government website that defines it as all crimes[0]. In their annual crime statistics they use it to refer to violence, thefts, robberies, property damage, scams, and drug use[1].
It's probably referring to acts carried out by youngsters in the banlieus (low income areas of France's big cities). Stuff like ambushing police and fire brigades for lolz, partaking in protests they care nothing about to just loot and burn, low/mid scale drug dealing etc.
Police has real problems dealing with these types cause there are so many of them together and they quickly scurry back in to their impenetrable tower blocks.
No it was an exaggeration, but for real though, people are placed in GAV (temporary incarceration) only because they are present during street protest, with the pretext of them being dangerous political opposition so you can guess the possible abuse
ps: there has been cases in France of people being sent to prison because of harassment on social networks though
There's a reason criminal rings buy crime-suited phones. Buying a cheapo android with the camera removed/disconnected is going to increase in Europe. Once again, I doubt this security measure will make anyone truly safer.
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 well stop with LE all together. Just let criminals do whatever they want without anyone trying to stop them. That's going to be awesome!
Edit: The down votes were expected, but next to clicking that button I'd love an actual response of how people think things will turn out of criminals get the power of technology and LE gets nothing.
1) LE has repeatedly shown that new policing powers will be used illegally, and without repercussion for their misuse. When the abuses are curbed and punished, perhaps they can be trusted with new shiny things.
2) between geolocation tracking, sting rays, ALPRs, phone/internet/email/web history providers subpoenas, doorbell cameras, face recognition, FISA/national security mass surveillance, drones, etc. one is supposed to believe that LE does not have the technological tools to do their job?
In most of Europe this does not (legally) exist and therefore will never be admissible in court.
> drones
Barely useful for catching criminals.
So no, LE, especially in Europe, does not have an incredible wealth of privacy intruding tools that can be applied willy nilly. But I live in a country where a cop needs to report removing their gun from their holster and every bullet is accounted for. It's a very different world from the US.
A law like this, in my country, would only be used in special circumstances for big time criminals, because the amount of work to actually apply it and the paperwork before that can actually happen is too big to apply in other cases. Maybe that's why I have less distrust towards laws like this, because I've seen how hard it is to actually apply them.
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. This does not require companies to create back doors, but allows LE to remotely enter devices of suspects if deemed necessary. This needs to be confirmed by a judge and therefore isn't applied very often, only in specific cases where there's no other option.
Fighting cyber crime without these laws becomes nearly impossible, because often a perpetrator is very good at covering their tracks and offensive hacking is a necessity to find a perpetrator. 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.
> 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.
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.
Having worked in tech, I can tell you for a fact that this is not the kind of technology LE needs to do their jobs effectively. I didn't downvote, but I can tell you that most folks where I live are not complaining about law enforcement not combatting cyber crime. Cyber crime, by definition, is not life-threatening. Life-threatening crime is what most people think LE needs to be better about combatting.
I'm genuinely curious what kind of cyber crime does LE think it's going to effectively combat? And to what end?
The issue is that even after measures like this, criminals still have limitless access to new technologies. Meanwhile, we also introduced a huge opportunity for the powerful to attack the powerless.
On the other hand, I do understand the government need to control the "e-space" so to speak; and I'm now lumping in here every form of internet control too. If a government ignores to control a popular information channel like the internet (or the radio, television, etc), powers that seek to replace the government will take root there and coordinate weakening them. So if they don't control it, others will, and that's not necessarily good for the people either. So, it's only natural that after a new form of communication is created, that regulation will come soon after that extends government control over it.
Problem is that trough laws like those, criminals will be getting the power as well. Here are multiple options how to implement this law, all are bad:
Mandated backdoors on the phones sold here - worse security for everyone except the criminals who will import their phones from abroad.
Hackers for hire like NSO group being paid by tax money for dveloping exploits - will be abused by everyone who can pay.
Government developing their own exploits - incredibly expensive and risky.
That all assumes criminals and LE are separate entities but in reality criminals will probably get access to those powers in some capacity, be it trough a breach, rouge employee or a corrupt leadership structure. On top of that, even in EU there are countries like Slovakia that were and after next elections likely will be ruled by parties with close connections to mafia.
All of these laws are always absolutely useless against serious criminals.
Outlawing technology doesnt work, because they will break laws, use open source code and not trust closed source code. For example, if you outlaw encrypted apps like Signal, they will simply use open source tools like PGP, which you cannot take away. However, the average non-technical citizen will suffer serious hacks because they actually obey the law and won't use the secure technology.
Likewise, in this case a serious criminal will use a phone with no microphone/camera or put it in a faraday bag, if they even use a phone at all at sensitive times. Meanwhile, the average citizen needs to constantly feel a chilling sense of being watched literally the same as in 1984.
LE has already proved hilariously inept and lazy at using the tools already available to them and you want more? Tools that have a history of being horribly abused? Yeah no.
LE barely solves basic crimes where a citizen can say "This person here, they stole my X, it has tracking and I know right where they are", why on earth would we give you more "toys" to invade our privacy and still not do your damn jobs.
In it's current state (arguably since inception) LE exists to protect the rich and powerful, the common citizen would be stupid (and/or horribly brainwashed) to give LE more tools at this current time.
Remove qualified immunity, make it your job to actually serve and protect and maybe we can talk.
LE should have tools to enforce the law, no question.
However, there's a huge difference between (a) setting up means for spying on 100% of the people and (b) developing operational excellence in LE to be able to follow individual cases.
Usually the path of (a) is followed because of mental laziness of politicians, assumed cost-saving, lobbying by some companies who want to sell their LE Big Data product and BS megalomania. Citizens have to stand up and fight against getting criminalized.
> setting up means for spying on 100% of the people
These means have existed since for ever. Phone taps have been around for as long as phones have existed, way before they became smart. Letters can be opened, everything can be intercepted. Even "pizzino".
Before "everything digital" it was logistically barely possible to spy on 100%. At times of GDR a mayor of the Stasi had resources to maybe wire-tap 50 people. Letters can only be opened for X amount of people. Now they have the possibilities to do 100%. That's a big difference.
> it was logistically barely possible to spy on 100%
It still is. LE barely has enough capacity to fight every criminal, let alone watch 100% of everything everyone does online. And if you look at how tough a time social media are having at content moderation it seems like tools to automate this well don't exist yet. Just look at stories like this:
I think this is a very appropriate argument when it comes to offensive physical weapons, like if cops with tasers are in a shootout with a gang strapped up with (illegal) AKs it's easy to see an undesirable outcome from that situation for just about everyone except the gang members - but does this same logic really hold when it comes to spy tech? Is the only way to stop a bad guy with remote access to your machine a good guy with the same?
I wouldn't be concerned about LE getting more power if I've not witnessed the scale of public sector corruption and collusion with capitalists. LE is getting exactly zero more powers from me until I see specific people I've met end up in jail for the crimes they did, for which there is plenty of LE powers available.
Until then sorry, not sorry. You are not wasting my freedoms and resources on monitoring the populace to ensure the criminals stay in power.
I would be perfectly happy with defunding police to provide more resources to people who actually care for addicts and homeless, trying to rehabilitate them. That's for the petty crime. I would also accept less policemen in the streets if it meant policemen with actual tech knowledge investigating while collar crime.
Also, legalize all the drugs (with proper regulation) and lay off everyone who wastes my money on stopping their proliferation. Instead start taking care of people who use them (and everybody else, for that matter). Hint: it's usually the socioeconomic background that drives people to use.
The camera I don't worry about so much. A 1 cent piece of duct tape is enough to deal with that. As I've done on laptops for years until manufacturers started listening and making sliders.
A microphone is much, much harder to block. It will hear through tape just fine. For a normal user who just wants privacy and doesn't want to pry open an expensive waterproof phone, what recourse do I have?
There are those cheapo dummy plugs that present as a microphone when inserted into the 3.5mm slot, which mutes the main mic. Of course, this strikes me as a software behavior that could be overridden.
Other than that I think the pinephone and librem5 are the only phones I'm aware of that actually have hardware microphone switches.
It is software behaviour in 95% of cases yes. At least on Android. iOS I don't know.
The Librem is ancient hardware for a top tier price and has a 20 week delivery time. The pinephone... Well yeah it's usable though the switches are under the back panel and can't be moved by hand, you need a pen, tweezer or toothpick or something as far as I've heard.
Opening a phone and removing front and rear cameras is easy. I did it when I replaced my broken ones. Plenty of videos on YouTube for any model. Removing the mic means listen-only phone calls, which arguably could be a feature in some businesses. Both are not for the general population. Maybe they'll sell some extra camera covers.
I understand that the headline is wrong, but it doesn't matter, because one day it might not be.
I need to have a phone that can protect against this, because it doesn't matter if it's a state doing it with a warrant or a talented hacker - either case is unacceptable to me.
So far a FairPhone running DivestOS and only trusted software via F-Droid is the best solution I have found. GrapheneOS on a Pixel is nice, but I don't want Google hardware if I'm not trusting their software.
Smart phone makers do not support this in their software (i.e. iOS does not provide some police spy dashboard), but there are many spyware-as-a-service providers like NSO Group (maker of the Pegasus spyware) that buy exploits and build a turnkey surveillance product. This bill simply provides a legal framework for LE to use such tools against French citizens.
This is probably the real answer - like most countries' attempts to change this kind of law it's about making something they already do legal, not because they want to do it in the future.
The bill authorize it using any technical means, specifically mentioning using classified methods («prescrire le recours au moyens de l'État soumis au secret de la défense nationale»)
Unless the light is physically connected to the power line of the camera sensor (and most aren't), it's useless as an indicator of covert camera usage - the spyware can just not turn it on.
Not on Android devices, but wasn't this what Apple said they did for Macbooks? That the light indicates power is going to the camera, and cannot be bypassed?
The privacy indicator on iPhones is just a green dot on the display. I don't think that's really possible to link to the same power supply. It'd have to be a separate light like on MacBooks.
(Thankfully MacBooks do at least physically disconnect the microphones if you close the lid.)
It could be independent of the OS software if it were a design goal (e.g. in safety-critical applications you sometimes have display controllers that have dedicated hardware layers for important indicators that are driven independently of the main display feed, something Apple could easily replicate given their level of integration)
And of course it doesn't have to be on the display, given they already have a cutout island in the display where they could place such a thing.
The green dot is meant as a privacy indicator - it tells you when something (camera, maybe mic?) is on. It doesn't relate to "remote" activation, and presumably would turn on in all circumstances.
They're not that smart. There's been several cases of "secure phone systems" getting breached by the govt who then got access the entire underworld's communications.
Why don't they just use Telegram / Whatsapp / Signal? Sure maybe the NSA can get in but afaik they don't bother with mid scale European cocaine importers.
Am I wrong in thinking that you could bypass Signal / E2E security by having access to the display (screenshots)? Is that a lot less feasible than access to the microphone or camera? Maybe that's much harder at the OS level?
We’re talking classic bandits that wear eye masks and striped shirts. REAL professionals who’ll stuff all their treasures into a big burlap sack with a dollar sign on it.
I guess one idea is that you could turn on video/audio/location broadcast and live stream it to some website all the time, 24x7. Now you are in the proper mindset of how to treat your device.
Have you heard of hacking? Most police forces have offensive hacking teams by now, it's not much of a secret. Also there are some quite famous tools that aid in this.
Do they? I can't really imagine anything like that. I would be inclined to believe that they purchase ready-made tools from Israeli/US companies. But hacker teams?
The camera and microphone of a modern smartphone are not trivial to hack. I highly doubt a local government would have the resources to even consider having such teams.
There's a Dutch TV show that regularly catches African fraudsters by literally using their camera's to take pictures of the fraudsters. Sure, they trick them into installing an app, but that's something LE can do as well.
Also, there are tools like Pegasus that pretty much do all the heavy lifting in hacking.
Is S30+ or KaiOS (previously FirefoxOS) which Nokia uses really that much more secure?
Also, usability becomes a thing here. Most people don't even use their phone for calls anymore. Not being able to do the other stuff defeats the purpose.
But no apps or dodgy email links you can hack them with, perhaps? No idea
The most basic phones don't have KaiOS.
There are / have been hacks using SMS that didn't even require the user to do anything, but then again they required Android iOS to carry out the hack.
The smaller the attack surface the better (for the criminal).
> Also, usability becomes a thing here. Most people don't even use their phone for calls anymore. Not being able to do the other stuff defeats the purpose.
Afaik criminals that were using these special phone systems like SkyECC just wanted to make calls and send messages, they'll use something else for TikTok or whatever.
EDIT: SkyECC didn't have microphone enabled, it was just able to send messages
Can't help but think that our governments are prepping for very harsh times coming up. Sorry for the pessimistic view, but this is what it looks like to me.
This is apparently with the approval of a judge (though that's not always meaningful), when targeting crimes that would lead to 10 years imprisonment at least.
In Germany they recently had a judge to allow for a swoop on annoying but harmless climate activists, including freezing their bank accounts and confiscating their homepage (in ridiculous ways, bc they only took the server and forgot assuming control over the domain).
It was very obvious that the ruling was politically motivated and they treated the climate activists like terrorists. What's alarming is that our governments seem to get more and more repressive.
The way it works in France is there's two chambers of parliament, the senate and the Assemblée nationale (that I translate to "the parliament"). Unless the law changes something in the constitution, the senate is just there to advise the parliament. If they'd voted no, it wouldn't have mattered.
It is up to the parliament to vote laws into effect
But the neolib right, the far-right and the conservative right compose >60% of the parliament so there's no need to hold your horses too much. For the retirement law, they didn't have the support of the far-right. Since I don't think the far-right is going to suddenly find themselves privacy lovers I think we can safely assume it'll go through