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.
