France Already Expanded Surveillance Twice In The Past Year -- Perhaps Expanding It Again Is Not The Answer?
from the maybe-it's-time-to-think-a-little-differently? dept
I've been having this discussion on Twitter and a few other places over the past few days, so it seemed only right to put it into a blog post. For all the ridiculous talk with politicians grandstanding and using the attacks in Paris last week as an excuse to expand surveillance powers, it seems worth noting that France actually expanded its surveillance state powers twice in the last year -- and the first time it didn't stop the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the second time obviously failed to stop the attacks last week. Already, before all of this, French intelligence had powers that were so similar to the NSA's that it was obvious that there had been some coordination. Then, late last year (actually on Christmas Eve), France quietly enacted a new surveillance law relating to data retention and requiring internet companies to cough up info on users.That went into effect just shortly before the Charlie Hebdo attacks. And, of course, with that new law failing to prevent those attacks, the French government did the kneejerk thing and expanded its surveillance powers even more, claiming it needed to do so to protect against the next attack. That law, which allowed authorities to monitor communications of suspected terrorrists without a judge's approval, went into effect in July, with supporters, including Prime Minister Manuel Valls declaring: "France now has a secure framework against terrorism." Yeah, how did that work out?
Maybe, instead of calling for greater and greater surveillance, we should take a step back and think if there isn't a better approach that doesn't involve continually tossing civil liberties in the trash, for no clear benefit.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: france, isis, kneejerk reactions, paris attacks, privacy, reactions, surveillance
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Why we need more surveillance
Unless the following is true: The terrorists are attracting the most intelligent, crafty and innovative minds available, who are easily able to circumvent the bumbling efforts of the "intelligence" agents, and probably die more frequently from pent-up laughter than drone strikes. This makes sense, given the recent heavy emphasis on terrorists "going dark" to avoid detection and the subsequent inability of any of the alphabet soup agencies to detect their activities before they act.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Why we need more surveillance
This is incredibly difficult to believe, perhaps you have data to back it up.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Why we need more surveillance
This is incredibly difficult to believe, perhaps you have data to back it up.---
They keep foiling and circumventing and getting around agencies that focus on attracting 'the best and brightest minds', who already have powers and capabilities, legal or not, costly enough to bankrupt a developed nation and expansive enough to make Orwell look like a libertarian Utopia?
If they aren't the most intelligent, crafty and innovative minds available, then what does that make our massive budget, huge, governmental, focused organizations?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Why we need more surveillance
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Why we need more surveillance
You want intelligent, crafty, innovative people... these include people who make a crossbow out of toilet paper, a plastic spoon and their underwear.
Being choked for resources tends to REQUIRE you be craftier, cleverer and one step ahead. Its why independantly developed games tend to manage such impressive things with so much less than we are used to.
Guess what these folks do?
They take their obsolete computers, hook up to a dial up modem, use open source encryption tools (that won't magically vanish even if the rest of us aren't allowed to use them. Remember that, because that's important), and hit social media until their remote, middle of nowhere location is compromised.
The good ones move on, the bad ones get caught. Doesn't matter, since that's like the ant you >notice
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Oppression
The people in control are the ones who are afraid - because they know they're the ones that are going to become the targets eventually.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Oppression
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Common Factor
The politicians and security "experts" remain the same and refuse to admit that they are incompetent. If they can't do the job with the tools at hand, they should step down and let someone who can do the job take over.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Common Factor
via spying
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
ISIS leadership met & planned in US prison Camp Bucca
It was at Camp Bucca that Abu Ahmed first met Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi....
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Accountability
In Paris, for the first time, we have a situation where the security agencies had been given everything they asked for, and more. And they still failed to protect us.
Consequences?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Accountability
So in an effort to be "equal" and not hurt anyone's feelings, they blanket-surveil everyone except for potential terrorists, 100% of whom are the type to wear blankets on their heads as a sectarian fashion requirement.
The U.S. won't empty out Dearborn; the U.K. won't empty out Birmingham; Sweden won't empty out Malmö, and Germany won't empty out, period. Until we start being smart about demographics and not worrying about Godwin's law or being "nice" and not offending the "marginalized," these attacks will continue on our soil.
Name the enemy and act accordingly. We are most definitely at war, and wars are never won by Quislings like Hollande, Merkel and Obama. We don't have to look for a needle in a haystack. We've got 2 billion needles that need to be banned for life from Western countries and cordoned off in their sandbox, never to breach the gates of Vienna or the shores of Ellis Island again.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Remember when France welcomed the Nazis?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
How to find a needle in a haystack
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: How to find a needle in a haystack
to jail you if you raise your voice a bit?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Blind Fear
Secondly, these panic sessions, reactions and laws they bring about have a HUGE money stake sucking up our rights and the income we provide to our governments in the form of taxes that are supposed to help make our societies BETTER, all around. Somebody is sure as hell not suffering the cost of milk and bread.
Finally, terrorism is a crime. What does that mean, exactly? It means we're all scab scratching idiots believing we can heal ourselves faster if we draw blood, usurp rights and continuously strip away privacy. Our actions are direct causes of terrorist feeding frenzies.. not too hard to create and foster deadly temperaments when needless and senseless civilian casualties spring forth from the eyes in the sky.
ponders self-censorship yet AGAIN - mother fuckers
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
You know what they say...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
le grand frère
26:51 youtu.be/lWFDVqQIJbo?t=26m51s
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Quite simply, the governments are not going to stick their collective heads in the sad and say "we can't do anything". They will keep working trying to make surveillance and monitoring work.
It's a sad fact of modern life, but it's not going away. Waving your arms frantically and making a fuss (how many articles today) won't change it, unless you have some seriously better ideas, not just air.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Yup, they will continue jamming that square peg into that round hole.
"Waving your arms frantically and making a fuss won't change it"
At least someone has the guts to point out the Emperor has no clothes, unlike many who parrot the popular talking points.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
It'd still be cheaper to start a federally funded 3mg/day ration of Xanax for every man, woman, and child in the US. Cradle to grave. Police officers get the Xanax plus all the Ketamine and Oxycontin they can take.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
No amount of ramped up surveillance will ever stop an independently formed (albeit indoctrinated by IS propaganda) terrorist cell consisting of some radicalized buddies from sussing out privately how to shoot up the next mall/convert venue/....
So, you don't think it's gross negligence to invest spare resources in techniques that have proven (time and again) to be ineffective rather than spending that man- and brainpower on coming up with alternative solutions that actually might work?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
But an all out assault (words not bombs) on the ideology that lies behind it just might stop them wanting to...
The belief that you will go to heaven if you die in this kind of attack is a powerful motivator if we can persuade them out of this belief then this type of attack would stop.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re:
And how do you plan to accomplish that when even "the good guys" cannot agree on the causes?
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
http://thin kprogress.org/world/2015/02/18/3624121/atlantic-gets-dangerously-wrong-isis-islam/
Who is right?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re:
They ABSOLUTELY want WW3. So does the American religious right, which is why they're so keen on a war with Iran.
So what do we do? May I humbly recommend recruiting counter-propagandists to
a) discredit the Caliphate as un-Islamic
b) discredit ISIS methods as cruel and unpopular
c) recommend alternative ways to dealing with the problems ISIS claims to solve
You see, as with the Communists, Party membership brings benefits. Non members get treated like crap and they are the ones who are fleeing to the West. This is deliberate, the idea being to force people to take sides, by:
a) making membership a condition of economic wellbeing
b) committing terrorist atrocities to turn Westerners against Muslims, thereby making them a target for reprisals
c) forcing people to flee leaves behind those who are either obliged to stay or are committed to ISIS
You can tell a tree by its roots. That poverty is endemic there is indeed a massive component of the problem as it gives people impetus to join an organisation they believe will make them better off, but it's not the only one.
Finally, what TP gets dangerously wrong about ISIS is that while most Muslims emphatically DO NOT agree that the Quran justifies what they're doing, ISIS itself and its supporters emphatically DO, and they say this all the time.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
How do you propose to do that given the stuff written in there? Don't start with "there are nice commands in there too" cause to fix the fact that an omnisicent, all powerful god would contradict itself in its holy book, the "scholars" agreed on the loophole that stuff "revealed" later supersedes the old.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
People who want to behave badly usually don't like to call themselves the bad guys. To go against accepted moral norms, then, requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance in which we give ourselves permission to do things we wouldn't normally do if particular conditions apply.
So we can, let's say, steal IF we are very hungry, utterly destitute, and have no other recourse as far as we're aware. Everybody, religious or not, does something like this sooner or later.
Or we can encourage others to believe that they can have a better standard of living in this life and glory in the next IF they run around murdering people who disagree with them and nick their stuff. This is "okay" because the people who disagree with them are actively opposing them by the act of disagreeing with them and are therefore a threat to the spread of the "correct" doctrine. It's easier to build consensus for a new paradigm when dissent has been eliminated.
Where ISIS is concerned, they're operating in Muslim lands and their main targets are "apostates," i.e. Muslims who think they are dangerous, psychopathic nutbuckets. This isn't being as widely reported as it should be, leading many of us to believe that we are the targets. No, for the most part it's the "wrong" Muslims. ISIS came after us in Paris because they want to turn the West against all Muslims in the hope of kicking off WW3 and going out in a blaze of glory.
So what we need to do is work with those Muslims who hate ISIS and help them to build and maintain an anti-ISIS consensus to make it harder for them to recruit followers. That means we don't persecute them "on principle" as some have been known to do.
And flat-out wholesale mass butchery is very un-Islamic, believe me. Ask a Muslim.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The entire cult is little more than the feverish revenge fantasy of an illiterate, epileptic, pedophilic serial killer with schizophrenic psychosis and a severely narcissistic "God complex." Should we have been "tolerant" of Charles Manson and his mass-murdering groupies in the 1960s, or David Koresh and his child-harem compound (Reno's overreach notwithstanding, the guy was a serious whack job)? Should Japan have simply shrugged when Shoko Asahara recruited people to kill their fellow citizens on a Tokyo subway and nearly acquired his own personal nuke?
Islam is a mental illness, as all religions are. But there is just something stubborn about this one that renders it immune to mitigating the symptoms in the way that Christianity and Judaism have been largely diluted in the West.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is right: Islam needs its own Reformation, leading up to an Enlightenment at which point enough people will say "this is bullshit" that it can finally be contained -- if not cast outright into the dustbin of history. But for some reason it just isn't happening, and if it's not going to, then the West has a duty to its people to isolate it, target it and let every last one of these 2 billion sheep-shaggers slaughter themselves to oblivion -- far away from where anyone in the Americas, Europe, the Far East and Australasia can know about it or care.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
*Fixed that for you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Or phrased differently, they let the attacks happen to reap the benefits of so many terrified people willing to give up their rights in an effort to prevent it from never happening again.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
REALLY?
have you read a book in your life?
it is maybe the continuity and expansion of government?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]