79
votes
France passes bill to allow police to remotely activate phone camera, microphone, and GPS, in order to spy on people
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- Title
- France set to allow police to spy through phones
- Published
- Jul 6 2023
- Word count
- 312 words
What do you think about this?
It gives me the creeps. Supposedly there would be checks and balances in place to prevent this from being abused but I doubt that's going to be effective. This is how a country becomes a police state. So much for “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.
This coming right after Macron floated the idea of closing down social media to stop the rioting. I foresee a lot more rioting in France in the months to come.
The best check and balance to prevent this from being abused is for this not to be possible in the first place. The only reason a state would want this ability is for control. Which, the passing of this law will ironically end up in more riots.
Yeah I think Batman and Morgan Freeman settled this debate a while ago. It’s too much power.
My instinctual reaction was like yours, it also gives me the creeps and feels like a huge overreach. But then I thought a bit more and I can’t really logically find differences between this and bugging someone’s house or workplace or wherever, which (according to my extensive research of watching part of The Wire and all of The Sopranos) is fairly common and needs a warrant, as this presumably will. It feels far more invasive, but is it? Can someone with more knowledge than me chime in on the real differences?
It is much more invasive because the phone is with the person most of the time. If the police is spying on my phone they would also be spying on everyone around me.
I could be at work or in somebody else's home, those people are not the subject of a criminal investigation but they're still being spied on.
So not only does this invade an individual's privacy, it also invades the privacy of everyone around that person. The impact is much larger than listening in on a phone call or tracking someone's location.
Also, the easier it becomes to spy on people, the more it will be (ab)used.
Don't forget, wiring requires direct access.
Anyone who knows how to use that backdoor can hit any vulnerable phone.
Sure hope you're not on anyone's radar.
Way more people need to know htis. If a backdoor exists for the government it will soon exist for everyone. Backdoors like these are the quickest and easiest way to compromise any system.
This is the discussion I have with folks okay with the British government trying to ban encryption, as if maths cares for regulation.
Wiring requires direct access but listening in on people's cell phone calls doesn't. Nobody uses hard lines anymore. A backdoor on the phone itself is also not required to listen in on phone calls, the police can listen in through the phone service provider.
Something else I just thought of too… the article says it’s primarily to use the location, and “could be used” to access camera and microphone. Is that “could” from the actual legislation or has the journalist extrapolated that? It feels like an important distinction
Much of that is applicable to bugs too, though. If your house is bugged and someone visits you then they’re under surveillance too, right? Though I suppose you can reasonably assume that someone visiting their home is known to them (and so potentially of interest) where a phone bug would pick up everyone in a supermarket or restaurant too, that the person doesn’t necessary know.
I definitely agree with the last part! And to be clear I’m not in favour of this, I just can’t quite articulate to myself why it feels so different.
The scope of the monitoring is entirely different. In your daily life you could be in contact with a hundred people or more when you're at work, in the supermarket, out in the city, in a restaurant or whatever. At home, you're most likely not in contact with that many people.
Traditional bugs are like fishing with a rod (small scope, more targeted) while this new law could potentially be like fishing with a trawler (larger scope, less targeted).
Yes, I said so in my comment.
Do you know whether bugs currently are allowed to be placed in, for example, a restaurant that the person under surveillance goes to a lot? Does it have to be their home or workplace? Though workplace also seems to have these same issues, if the work isn’t part of the crime.
The thing is, I don't have to provide an argument. I can just say no, I don't want my right to privacy further eroded. (Especially not by the powers who had let society sink into a surveliance nightmare the last two decades. They have clearly demonstrated that they are unable to handle it.)
Sure. You didn’t have to comment either but you obviously want to air your opinion, so why not expand on it? What is different, for you, about this compared to the current system of being able to bug people?
Like I said elsewhere I’m not for it either because it feels worse, somehow, but I can’t really articulate why it’s worse. I’m interested in what other people see as the difference.
Okay ... in retrospect, I'm not entirely sure if my argumentation is sound, but my point was that if I want to keep my basic rights (privacy) I don't have to care about what benefits other might gain from taking it away. Rights are not a priveledge, they are a right. Like, you have a right to, say, decide for yourself whether you want to give me all your money. Even if I have ever so good an argument why you should hand them over, you can still simply say no.
That's not a particularly strong argument because rights aren't inalienable. Never were, never will be, in any political system.
For example, yes you have the right to move freely. Until a judge (and in some systems, a jury) decides you should be put in prison, then you no longer have the right to move freely. And yes you have the right to privacy. Until a judge signs a warrant and then your personal belongings can be ransacked and your phone line bugged. This is already a reality, literally everywhere.
I'm sorry but that's not how the world works. There's strong incentive towards more surveillance in both dictatorships and democracies. And not just in theory, we see it in practice. You are under the assumption that you win by default and don't have to argue. But in reality you lose by default. People have already accepted complete loss to privacy as long as a judge signs a warrant. Extending that to include another device legally, is a pretty small step. Unless people who are against it fight like hell (and yes, that includes having a convincing argument to convince the masses to join your side), it is gonna happen.
Indeed, rights can never be inalienable. There are always terms: society's. They are constructed and given by society, and they can be taken by society.
We all have rights to healthcare, education, and shelter. But they are unnatural. The natural universe would never provide these to us. Society decided that they are good things, and that society itself would be better off if everyone enjoyed some minimum of those things.
Ultimately, rights are bounded. A boundary emerges at the meeting of two territories, of two different rights.
I agree you don’t need to have a reason. I mostly just think it’s interesting that we’re having this quite emotional response to this idea when it’s not very different to what they’re allowed to do already. Which is also fine, it’s absolutely ok to have emotional reasons over logical ones, but it’s good to explore that too I think
Especially given that France was the precursor to the modern police state!
Still think Macron let the riots keep going to put ahead these states policies for "security".
They are already rioting. I don’t imagine this is going to make anyone happy. This is a huge abuse of power. The article outlines a punch of parameters where it would be used or not used, but it lays the foundation for things to go much further than this. I can’t really see it stopping here.
So...more riots then?
I feel like a ton of people are just reading the headline and ignoring the context.
The police need a warrant, and the suspected crime warranting the wiretap has to have a penalty of 5+ years in jail. The policy is intended to help fight organized crime, which is very technologically savvy and usually involves serious offenses.
It still is a huge power grab by the government. We shouldn't just be willing to give away our rights in this impossible crusade for “security”. This is just another step in dismantling the right to privacy.
Yes the police needs a warrant but it's not like those have never been abused before.
Do you think we should get rid of warrants and the warrant process?
Obviously not. You just shouldn't be under the impression that the need for a warrant makes laws like these acceptable in my opinion.
What makes this unacceptable compared to existing laws that allow warrants for searches and seizures?
The scope and impact of this is so much larger than any current form of surveillance.
This new law allows the police to remotely activate devices and record sounds and images of people suspected of terrorism, organized crime and “delinquency” (whatever that may be). This basically means the police will be given carte blanche to listen in on people everywhere and at any time. A mobile phone is... mobile. That means the target will carry it with them everywhere they go and that means the police can spy on a very large area and on a large amount of people.
A warrant typically has to be very specific, it has to specify what they want to listen in on and who they target. That is literally impossible when you're recording audio and video from somebody's smartphone. You could come into contact with dozens of people every day who have nothing to do with any investigation, their privacy will be negatively impacted by this. It's nothing less than indiscriminate surveillance. It completely disregards the right to privacy of people around the target, as well as the right to privacy of the target itself.
Privacy is a fundamental human right and your privacy shouldn't be lost because your friend, co-worker, or neighbor happens to be the target of an investigation. We're asked time and again to give up some of our privacy for this unreachable goal of perfect safety and it has to end somewhere. We've already gone too far in my opinion, so any further step towards a totalitarian police state should be resisted. I'm ashamed to admit that my own country (the Netherlands) is one of the worst countries when it comes to wire taps, they're used on a very large scale. If a law like this were to be introduced here I'm certain the police would jump on it and mass surveillance would become even worse than it already is.
... if the target is suspected of a crime that is punishable by at least 5 years in prison and meets the criteria of a warrant.
That is called "incidental collection" and it happens with every single form of intelligence gathering. The only way to not do it is to not collect intelligence.
Or “delinquency”, which can basically mean anything. It's a recipe for abuse of power.
Yes it happens with other forms of intelligence gathering but to a much lesser degree. Incidental collection should always be kept to the absolute minimum, which is impossible with indiscriminate methods of surveillance like this.
Alfred thought this was a morally gray area. I guess Batman was right, not so gray now.
The originally submitted article appears to be a truncated copy of this Le Monde/AFP article, and even used all the exact same quotes, and much of the same wording:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/france-set-to-allow-police-to-spy-through-phones_6044269_7.html
So I have changed the link to what is presumably the original source.
/offtopic
Thank you.
Ain't nobody played Watch_Dogs and it shows
France is a laughing stock these days.
Most police agencies in Europe aren't allowed to do this AFAIK. They can record phone calls and trace their location but I don't think they can typically spy on the camera or listen in on the microphone outside of phone calls.
I suspect that they may have some problems at the ECJ (at least I hope)