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Revelations On the French Big Brother

Posted by Soulskill on from the quick-rename-french-fries-again dept.

Wrath0fb0b writes "Days after President François Hollande sternly told the United States to stop spying on its allies, the newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France. The report notes that 'our email messages, SMS messages, itemized phone bills and connections to FaceBook and Twitter are then stored for years.' For those Slashdot readers that grok Français, you can read the original at Le Monde or the translated version from LM."

7 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Tinfoil time by PsychicX · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's almost as if every country of note is running massive internet surveillance programs, is aware of everybody else's program, and is only using the leaks as an excuse to publicly complain about something everyone knows everyone else is doing.

    Nah, that would just be paranoid.

    1. Re:Tinfoil time by Charliemopps · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Except for, you know, the public. The general public had no idea how ridiculous the surveillance was. I think everyone assumed there was some surveillance going on... but capturing everything? Really? At the tune of 80 billion a year? That money could go towards curing cancer or heart disease and they'd save a lot more lives than they ever will preventing the occasional terrorist attack, and it's doubtful they've actually prevented anything give that in most cases the perpetrators couldn't even find weapons or explosives without the undercover FBI agents offering to sell them the stuff.

      It's also telling the as soon as a government starts complaining about what the US is doing, their own surveillance programs are revealed. The US is clearly involved in a heavy game of public distraction. The medias pretty much dropped this story, likely at their request, and can conveniently cover what all the other countries are doing. It's staggering that these actions are being presented in any way that is even remotely considered acceptable. All of this is completely unconstitutional, government officials including the president (past and present) should be facing prison time.

    2. Re:Tinfoil time by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's almost as if every country of note is running massive internet surveillance programs

      Maybe that's why Snowden is having such a hard time finding asylum. Everyone's doing it, nobody wants it public knowledge.

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    3. Re:Tinfoil time by Livius · · Score: 1, Insightful

      At the tune of 80 billion a year? That money could go towards curing cancer or heart disease and they'd save a lot more lives than they ever will preventing the occasional terrorist attack

      So, having conned taxpayers out of 80 billion a year, the military-industrial complex would just voluntarily hand it over to an actual productive sector of the economy for a constructive purpose?

  2. Everyone is spying on everyone by Presto+Vivace · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Private companies have set up their own spying operations. Bloomberg Financial is spying on Goldman Sachs. and Murdoch is running saboteur operations against his competitors. And these same people keep calling to tougher measures against hackers.It is as if the entire international power structure walked out of a Vladimir Voinovich novel. Sigh.

  3. Existence to Corruption. by Tim12s · · Score: 1, Insightful

    The fact that one exists results in the need for at least two. "Green peace" type folks may think that this can be "rioted" out of existance however then, only bad men will have guns. What is better is to advocate more effective and honest control and oversight of the use of these facilities. The key is anti-corruption through civilized morals. Where there is no moral backbone within society then there is no effective ability to even comprehend effective oversight and it quickly the world turns to dog-eat-dog mentality through the use of corruption.

  4. Small differences by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Insightful
    They do only with what comes in and out of France. In the other hand, US hacks foreign companies to get information on everyone, no matter where. And probably in France https worth something, but for US services the information must be given to the government in a silver plate by the companies (that is what PRISM is all about, after all) . And, of course, is US who defines hacking as act of war.

    So this is a mostly unilateral war, and you could see the monitoring that could do some other countries mostly as self-defense.

    The point is that people from all the world should care about what the US is doing (because affects everyone) while French (and a small fraction of other countries) people should care also about what they government do. Also, I don't see France putting in jail or doing a massive international manhunt for the people working for Le Monde, violating every international treaty and convention doing so, as US is doing (and forcing their allies to do) with Assange and Snowden, we are just past the point of absolute corruption, and seeing the first hints of what is coming in the next years.