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French Surveillance Law Implicates Internet Service Providers, Web Hosts
Internet service providers in France will have to install black boxes that analyze users’ metadata and alert authorities of possible terrorist activity under the country’s sweeping surveillance bill, which the Constitutional Council approved on Thursday night.
Link to full article below.
Ignoring the fact that these black boxes are a bad idea for a lot of reasons and all the technical hurdles associated therein - assuming the law is successfully passed, does this change anybody's enthusiasm for hosting in France? Or does one just assume that you're under surveillance all the time anyway so this is just one more level to overcome?
thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/french-surveillance-law-implicates-internet-service-providers-web-hosts
Comments
This. You cannot fight surveillance, either legal, constitutional and approved by laws, or illegal, approved by laws, but unconstitutional, approved and constitutional but without proper supervision as required by law, or with corrupted "enlisted" judges to rubber stamp everything, otherwise than through encrypting everything.
And then some countries want to ban the use of encryption.
Yes, because they know we will always have that.
However, it is not possible to ban encryption, they will use another method, making you a criminal if you encrypt something and dont keep the key or refuse to give it to them. UK is partly there, in US will be unconstitutional, but they dont care about such details, so I see similar moves, such as holding you in contempt or something.
making encrypted networks by default where everyone is anonymous will make it extremely hard to implement surveillance, police will have to go back to the old methods in the times they were actually doing police work, not fight freedom, like infiltration, undercover and sting operations, witnesses and all. They will have to choose what to do, fight crime or democracy, and you will be surprised at their choice... Well, some of you.
The people were going to stand against this but then they decided to stick to what they do best and retreat.
Thank you I'm here all night.
Just make surveillance nearly impossible through heavy use of encryption and Tor and don't buy servers in France anymore.
/thread
I assume by "enthusiasm", you mean "can't afford to host elsewhere".. This law won't change that.
Businesses have to obey the laws of where they're based in as well as where they host, so for French businesses and any other businesses in countries with lots of surveillance (Five Eyes countries and many, many others), this won't change anything. Even the countries that don't engage in heavy surveillance themselves still have to put up with the fact that >90% of Internet traffic is being tapped by at least one other government.
The solution is, like others have said, to learn how to use encryption properly and to use it as much as possible. If enough traffic is encrypted properly, it won't be financially viable/useful to tap everything and police will have to do real work like @Maounique said. In the UK we often frown on cuts to policing but in reality, our police have far too much time and get involved in all sorts of random stuff. Financial pressures are what will make them focus on real criminals.
And yes, in the UK it's already a crime to not hand over passwords/keys. IIRC they don't even need a rubber stamp from a judge, they just need a signature from possibly the least popular politician, Theresa May, who is somehow qualified to make these decisions with her BA in geography. The US doesn't officially have this law but was easily capable of making Lavabit do this anyway.
On a related note, I am genuinely concerned for life in the UK with all of the changes over the last 10 years of so - economically, politically and legally. I'll leave this quote from our Prime Minister here:
/rant
The reason for lack of fireworks at Disneyland Paris....
'Cheese-eating surrender monkeys' is the British term.
Swiftly approaching the capacity for memory of a solipsistic goldfish, the media shifts its resplendent gaze toward France in another unplanned maneuver. Meanwhile, all the other countries in the world continue on happily in their respective states of non-surveillance, awaiting only France's next move.
@TinyTunnel_Tom your dream has come true!
I only have one VPS in France and if somebody wants to spend a lot of money to monitor my ICMP packets then have at it.
What Metadata? ISP already can view all traffic metadata.. so now metadata of hosted files? Or what?
They are just making new laws for what they were doing already. Do you not think France was already monitoring the internet? You must be blind! France is just the next domino to fall in a long line of countries that have given into fear. The problem with giving governments so much power is that they will never give it back.
That would be great! That means that we can more easily hack into their credit card systems' for a sack of free cash.
(jks)
Seriously though, is this somehow worse than what all the other countries and Tier 1 providers are doing? Are the 'black boxes' in question unprecedented?
I don't think that ISPs in Canada and US are required to install a specific "box" for monitoring purposes. This would certainly be a burden for smaller companies - both in cost of installation and maintenance. It also sounds like the French may have a specific company in mind to manufacture these devices, so perhaps there's some attempt to get a lucrative contract into the hands of somebody's friend, as it were. It's been said before: "follow the money." The well known Qosmos apparently has a strong connection to French intelligence services and has received public funding in the past. Interestingly, they've also been investigated for providing surveillance tools to several foreign dictatorships. The plot thickens, eh?
Okay, so I hacked one of the black boxes and it appears that they have been targetting Jean-Claude Van Damme...
I suspect that French intelligence services are angling for their own reality show and now busy gathering material. That could help fund some of their other exploits.
Although, interestingly enough, in preemptively admitting the presence of a device, aren't the French only being more open about the practice? I meant if other countries aren't openly using a 'black box' or [INSERT the latest ultravoyeurist dragnet-production tool of shame] isn't it only because they're achieving something similar but more surreptitiously?
I don't agree with it, but at the same time it seems amusing to condemn something that is overt about its presence from the start as opposed to that which tiresomely attempts to hide its own unconscionable implementation until the predictable/inexorable moment of being found out.
My guess is they're aware of the inevitability and aiming to fast-forward through the tedious, time-wasting 'revelation cycle' in the news. Kind of a hilarious approach (especially the 'trying to pass it into law' part) and less scandal time for the journalists to profit from, but hey, at least it's more honest than the other wanker-nations out there that vy to be covert about the practice!
Just because there's precedent doesn't make it right. See: Racism, Fascism, War.
@Rallias he already said he doesn't agree with it.
ISP, just DSL or everything?