French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People Through Their Cell Phones | Hacker News Reader

French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People Through Their Cell Phones

schneier.com

72 pointswarrenm37 comments

> And sensitive professions including doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges and MPs would not be legitimate targets.

Not you though, you filthy peasant. Only Cloud People get a right to privacy, not disgusting Dirt People.

I wonder what the criteria for “journalist” is in France and how to achieve that lofty title.

Seems easier than becoming any of the other titles.

You need to have journalism as a regular, paid activity, in a press company, from which most of your income comes. There is a committee of journalists & press companies representatives that review applications.

> You need to have journalism as a regular, paid activity, in a press company, from which most of your income comes

So a part-time, amateur citizen investigator/journalist gets spied on, but a corporate employed one is protected.

>sensitive professions including doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges and MPs would not be legitimate targets

Well gee, ain't that convenient, that the ruling class is exempt from the invasive laws they set. Privacy for me, not for thee.

Hey french people, maybe it's time to get them ol' faithful guillotines out of the mothballs, your ruling class is acting up again.

France has been on fire for more than a year now from protests.

Perhaps the bell tolls for thee ?

Some animals are more equal than others.

Well, I'm just relieved that there will never be any scope creep, and the police will never abuse these privileges, and this capability will never escape the careful custody of authorized law enforcement officers. I'm thankful that at least somebody has thought of the children.

Related recent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36626966

Time for Arduino & Raspberry Pi based phones to pickup steam

It's not like they couldn't before. They just openly declared "Now we will allow ourselves to do it".

How did they do it before?

excerpts from https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/france-s...

bring millions of people you cannot integrate -> let them run amok -> gain convenient excuse to clamp down on privacy and add more surveillance -> slowly become a dictatorship due to people giving up their freedom for security (from the consequences you willingly created) It's the UK formula again. Bonus points: you also decrease wages and increase rent and house prices doing this, so you basically keep winning in your gated communities

What exactly would the end game be? resetting the clock to the middle ages? I don't think this is all planned, I think people underestimate the shortsightedness of governments.

Is the justification “to protect children”? That’s always the thin end of the wedge.

All the other police organizations in the world now licking their lips and rubbing their hands.

Just like American and British ones :(

Is it wire tapping like in "The Wire" or there would be a backdoor on smartphones?

The article, which can be accessed by clicking the link near the top of this page, makes it sound like the legislation requires full remote control. So more like a backdoor on smartphones.

Seems like criminals would buy phones in other countries and put a local SIM in them. Or, we're all going to be backdoored with a flimsy "check if network is in France" feature flag. Wonderful!

The former might actually work out in the police's favour. As in the case of AN0M, if they can sow distrust in an established communications platform and seed a compromised alternative, the people they're targeting will buy their surveillance from the police themselves.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-09/operation-ironside-an...

I think it would make hacking the phone legal, and then having the rootkit on the phone legitimate to be able to bring the evidence to court.

From what I have read, it seems to be pretty easy to hack a phone if you have control of the cellular network.

Les flics, va t'en. Connards et putains.

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