Slashdot Mirror
France To Open Preliminary Investigation About PRISM Program
An anonymous reader writes "Paris' prosecutor office opened a preliminary investigation after a complaint by two human rights associations who hope to determine the roles played by companies in the PRISM program. Two million communications (phone calls, SMS and mails) are said to have been intercepted in France by U.S. agencies."
And this is different from the whole world history... how? Yes, most people are complacent with order of things - be it current governments, Middle Age absolute monarchy or, say, bloody Aztec theocracy. Still, history teaches us that there is no need for the "masses" to be upset about anything for changes to come. On the contrary, mass starvation and poverty can lead to mass riots, even change ruling dynasty, but almost never to some radical changes in the country's ruling system.
For the real changes to come there must be a small percentage of unhappy "elite", like bourgeois in France or "intelligentsya / intellectuals" in Russia. Then they can lead masses to the revolution that will bring real changes. Problem is, our current elites are trying to use and even exploit existing systems of government, instead of trying to change it completely. So, yes, we won't have any real revolutionary changes in the foreseeable future, but not because of the "tubes". It's because everybody with the real power (even "middle class") are really happy with the current state of things.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
I dunno about other European countries, but in Sweden we definitely have a counterpart to NSA (FRA) that does similarly all-encompassing surveillance, all of course under the guise of "anti-terrorism". As an added "bonus" the laws regulating FRA explicitly says that they're allowed to exchange the information with foreign nations (read the US).
To dupe citizens into believing that the information isn't abused (of course the mere fact that the information is collected is abuse, but...) a special group has been set up to monitor the use of the information. But despite finding a lot of violations of the (already very permissive) regulations, FRA does not rectify any of their so called mistakes.
One example is that they're not allowed to save the information more than a certain time period (I believe it's 6 months). "Oh, but we copied the information to a different database! Now it's not raw data anymore, it's refined intellgence reports that aren't covered by that time limitation".
But other than that I agree. Two (or many) wrongs doesn't make a right.