France legalizes remote camera and microphone activation in smartphones

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.

If French workers allow Macron to jack the retirement age up, the price surely will be felt by their own children.

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

ps: there has been cases in France of people being sent to prison because of harassment on social networks though

Or am I oversimplifying. Please say so.

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.

(I am EU based.)

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.

I'm genuinely curious what kind of cyber crime does LE think it's going to effectively combat? And to what end?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

But not the ability to compromise the tech everyone else uses.

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.

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.

Also, there are tools like Pegasus that pretty much do all the heavy lifting in hacking.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shutdown_of_Sky_ECC