Quelle surprise !
French snooping as deep as PRISM: Le Monde
Edward Snowden's revelations about American communications snoopery have inspired newspapers around the world to investigate domestic spying, the latest of which is Le Monde in France. The newspaper's exposé (French language) finds that French citizens' communications are just as thoroughly trawled as those in America. “The …
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Friday 5th July 2013 06:07 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: It's okay, they're French...
You should have used a joke tag instead :)
The interesting thing about metadata trawling is that language is totally irrelevant. You may be speaking Navaho and you will still show up on the number cruncher as a "suspect of interest" if you talk to the "wrong" people. Once you have shown up on that trawl they will find someone who speaks Navaho (or Glaswegian), trust me.
Welcome to the brave new world. Actually, not brave new world, welcome to "This Perfect Day". We should probably thank Google for doing so much to advance the humanity towards that - after all they figured out how to trawl through the metadata morass in the first place. Viva la conditional probability. Alors enfants de la MapReduce.... Puts all those Schmidt rants about no privacy and nothing to hide in the right perspective...
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Friday 5th July 2013 02:51 GMT Rampant Spaniel
Not exactly a shock. You spy on my back and I'll spy on yours and there is less of a constitutional issue. Amusing how the countries that were all indignant about the US spying on them all have their own little operations. I don't condone it, but even the folks without tinfoil hats have pretty much concluded that everything was monitored by someone.
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Friday 5th July 2013 03:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
And in Egypt...
Meanwhile over in Egypt, the new military dictatorship is rounding up supporters of the former government using all this lovely meta-data linking them together.
Because metadata has no bad uses at all... nope, none at all.
[for GCHQ: Don't shoot the messenger. These are truths no matter that I say them, and your ability to shut me up doesn't make them any less true].
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Friday 5th July 2013 09:25 GMT John Smith 19
Re: And in Egypt...
"Meanwhile over in Egypt, the new military dictatorship is rounding up supporters of the former government using all this lovely meta-data linking them together."
The former government was othewise known as "The Moslem Brotherhood." an outfit Osama Bin Laden was quite fond of.
My impression of the MB is that for a lot of Middle Eastern countries they are about as popular with their governments as the Paedophile Information Exchange would be running for office.
Being elected is about as great a stress test of democracy as any I can think of.
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Friday 5th July 2013 12:31 GMT Tom 13
Re: rounding up supporters of the former government
The way I read it, they were rounding up the leaders of a government that for good and sufficient reason had lost the support of the people.*
But rant on anyway.
*Is this a dangerous path? Certainly. Does this increase the odds of Egypt devolving into some sort of military dicatorship? Again, certainly. But I'm doubtful the other path was any less dangerous.
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Saturday 6th July 2013 19:28 GMT Daniel B.
Re: And in Egypt...
The "former government" had lost a lot of support from the public, nonetheless because they were silently taking over the entire government. It sounds weird, but the consensus seems to be that the Egyptian Army actually saved the country. Of course, it remains to be seen if the Army will actually hand back the country to the next elected gov't...
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Friday 5th July 2013 06:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
No surprise...
I'd be surprised if most major countries (particularly China, Russia, maybe India) don't have something similar. It's just that most of the others vet their people well enough at the moment to avoid a Snowden.
At the end of the day, the role of an intelligence service is to gather intelligence from as many sources as possible. This isn't an ethical point, just a fact. I can imagine how jealous the SS, NKVD, Stasi etc would be of such ability.
AC to pretend that I'm not being snooped on (*looks for black helicopters while wearing tinfoil hat*).
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Friday 5th July 2013 21:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: And have they stopped... @ smudge
Allegedly there have been DGSE microphones hidden in the first class seats of at least an Air France Paris to Japan flight. Purely aimed at those terrrizts who travel first class!
Oh and the Frenchelon internet systems that I've read about (and talked to the operators) don't just store Metadata but allow keyword CONTENT searches through an entire years phone/data traffic store. Same system that Sarkozy sold to Libya. Good Point: French parliament does get an oversight in the form of two closed sessions per year where they can analyze the interception statistics. Bad Point: The MinEfi mentioned that the difference between these French (and •any• 'Snowden') intel systems and a digital weapon is all down to how it is used. It's a pity that France sold 'loaded' Amesys-Bull DPI systems in the past which seem to have been used in cyber attacks and worse. So by their own standards they have used these systems as weapons or proxy weapons.
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Friday 5th July 2013 20:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Berlin Wall came down amidst general rejoicing only for us now to discover...........
The funny thing is, the very laws the French are using to gather this data, were struck down by Germany (one half of which is ex-Eastern Block, the other half occupied by three Western powers until the 90s), as well as the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, and even the Hungarians have asked for a legal review before implementing ED 2006/24/EC. See a pattern here?
http://www.ip-watch.org/2013/06/01/eu-anti-terror-data-retention-directive-meeting-resistance-in-eu-courts/
Another link. Read it and weep: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/police-cooperation/data-retention/index_en.htm
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Friday 5th July 2013 20:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Berlin Wall came down amidst general rejoicing only for us now to discover...........
Another interesting article:
https://www.eff.org/issues/mandatory-data-retention/eu
« The European Commission is carrying out an impact assessment of the Directive and has announced its intention to propose a revision. Leaked documents confirm that the Commission is seeking to create evidence supporting the need for a DRD scheme in the EU and unnamed parties are seeking to broaden the uses of DRD to include prosecution of copyright infringement. »
Like the last bit?
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Saturday 6th July 2013 05:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: The Berlin Wall came down amidst general rejoicing only for us now to discover...........
I've heard, so this is hearsay, that EU plod aren't actually using hardly *any* of the data retained under the DRD. The matrix of use per nation has looked very empty! Memos have gone out to demand that someone should at least 'look' like they're using this data in crime response in the various national forces across the EU. (As the whole idea behind DRD data is intended to feed & share/trade raw product with NSA its obvious that the plods are a bit out of the loop) I just hope that "memos" satisfy the UK led hardliners on DRD, so that they never require the falseflag approach for justification.
If UK plod ever requested any retained hearsay data under DRD, then under RIPA its status would also be 'hearsay' and not used in court.
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Friday 5th July 2013 09:48 GMT jubtastic1
I can understand the why
If its your job to protect the elected government from any and all threats then it follows that you'd want to know everything about everyone, but surely they also understand that in building this apparatus they provide an unscrupulous government with the means to coerce and control the electorate, which would be an orders of magnitude larger failure of their mission than the occasional terrorist attack.
The intelligence services of the free world have set themselves up to fail, and the billions of the people their agencies were created to protect will pay the price in blood, sweat and tears. There needs to be an urgent public discussion about the implications of mass surveillance, and what if any constitutional safeguards exist to keep this crushing weight, balanced precariously above our heads from crashing down on us.
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Friday 5th July 2013 10:35 GMT i like crisps
Didn't they learn anything form Agincourt?
I was quite upset about the idea of PRISM, the NSA and GCHQ hanging out of our arses for all time,
but this revelation has really 'miffed' me. Who do these 'Frenches' think they are? If anyone is going
to mass surveil the entire planet and hold it's population captive then by George it's going to be good
old Blighty and her pimp (USA), and not a bunch frogs legs!!!
So come on everybody lets get behind our un-elected, sinister, state sponsored murdering, Security
Services and stick it to the French...EN-GER-LAND, EN-GER-LAND, rule Britania blah blah blah blah blah,
five chinese blah blah blah blah blah bang bang bang bang bang...God bless her Majesty.
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Friday 5th July 2013 11:53 GMT heyrick
Not the same as PRISM
As the likes of The Daily Mail like to gloss over, the French are mostly snooping on the French. You'd be a fool not to think your own government is spying on you.
PRISM, on the other hand, is the Americans snooping and profiling everybody who is not an American. There is a world of difference there.
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Friday 5th July 2013 13:33 GMT Olivreghw
electromagnetic signals
Hello,
“The Directorate General for External Security (DGSE, the services special) systematically collect electromagnetic signals from computers or phones in France, as well as flows between French and abroad,” the outlet writes. “All e-mails, text messages, telephone records, access to Facebook , Twitter , are then stored for years.
It says that it "systematically collect electromagnetic signals"... what does it mean ?
I guess that using "electromagnetic signals" they can collect data from satellite communication or mobile phone.
But what about land line communications ? I guess that most people use Internet from land lines...
so do the spooks spy on those lines ?
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Friday 5th July 2013 14:58 GMT Graham Cobb
Different from PRISM
This French news is very different from PRISM: PRISM was about the co-operation of commercial companies, allowing NSA to look at the unencrypted services being provided. The French, on the other hand, seem to be limited to watching the traffic on the wires.
If people use encryption to access their Google/Microsoft/Facebook/... services then watching the traffic on the wire tells them nothing. That is why PRISM exists: to be able to see the actual service being provided.
Of course, almost all email is still unencrypted so, if the DGSE can catch the email in transit, they can capture it.