France rejects backdoor mandate

Listening to the debates in the lower chamber (Assemblée Nationale) and the arguments of those arguing in favor of backdoors clearly show they do not have a clue how any of this works. They are not clever players doing double-bluffs. They are ignorant stooges.

I'm sure some of them do but encryption is pretty unusual as a lock that police can't break. If a judge orders a search of your house and the incriminating evidence is in a safe they will break it open if you refuse to open it for them. Governments aren't exactly happy that for digital assets there's ready made mass-market systems where the response to any search warrant will be to pound sand.

When law enforcement tells you that they're being hindered by the fact that even unsophisticated criminals have E2EE messaging and that's their biggest source of evidence (pulling text records) then asking for back doors starts to sound reasonable. It isn't of course because it defeats the whole point but it doesn't have to be a crusade against speech or whatever.

The UK and Australia are ahead of countries like France in restricting freedom, so this sounds like a poor attempt to avoid complimenting the US specifically.

> These aren't dumb people.

Yes, they absolutely are. I agree with the rest of your comment, they aren't interested in privacy or security, want generalized surveillance, and are world-class liars.

But they are also pretty dumb and extremely ignorant of anything technical.

>especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries.

Have you been reading English-language news? Attempts at limiting privacy and advancing surveillance have been nonstop in the anglophone world over the past decades. What may even have been the first attempt at having a backdoor mandate was American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

I sort of agree with them. I want all privacy abolished for politicians. Think about it, if we live stream them in the shower we might get some much needed young people to take the job. Let them keep the ad revenue. Only fans suggests it should be the best paid job out there and the workers are all about public approval.

no more naughty business!

I strongly disagree.

Politicians: technology that strengthens the power of the state, against crime, but also militarily, for spying on enemies both foreign and domestic.

Citizens: defensive architecture that prevents the state from preventing free speech.

This is especially relevant in the era of AI, where the cost of mass surveillance is virtually zero, and is incredibly powerful at sentiment analysis and summarization. Free speech is threatened when any statement can and will be used against you.

also politicians want a backdoor especially for tracking treason / spying possibilities, which in a way comes under police investigating crimes but is more national security apparatus protecting the state.

French want less criminals and immigrants in the street. Whatever it takes.

I'm french, i have not heard any people, work, street, even television or internet speak about that.

The sad truth is that it wouldn't even solve the issue, criminals will always be able to use encrypted communications. there are open source software that can't be tampered with, software that doesn't use a single server where backdoor can be put, or they could even simply encrypt their text message. i could do that from my mac terminal and Bruno Retailleau isn't going to put a backdoor in my mac terminal...

One problem is that public opinion is also often at odds with facts. It's not hard to find a sequence of "Do you want X or Y" type questions that will send many people into a circle of intransitive preferences.

> to them the relevant knowledge is knowledge of what voters will support or tolerate

That's relevant knowledge. It's not the relevant knowledge. Another piece of relevant knowledge is facts about complex things like political science, cryptography, etc. Since politicians actually need to decide and implement things, as a side gig to being popular, lack of the proper knowledge to do so is a shortcoming.

> I would like to know what the public opinion on these issues is

Not big sample sizes, but I regularly ask and interview people from all sides of life, and to a simple question like "Do you think the police should spy on you if that catches criminals?" the answer is always a resounding "no". Especially young people. They just way "No way. We're not criminals". They "arguments" may be choppy, muddy waters, but I don't think peoples feelings about being spied on is much of a mystery.

The "war" on drugs is what brings all of the violence and crime associated with drugs, not the drugs themselves. But it finances the police industrial complex and so many people would lose out (or be forced to focus on actual crimes rather than people consensually trading plants or chemicals) that it will never happen.

It kinda doesn’t matter; Individuals aren’t making foreign policy decisions day-by-day, Republicans leaders are. Until we effect change in our government, we are hostile to most of our allies.

What I had in mind is that I go to a local market every Sunday to buy some nice fresh food. But e.g. for the fish/meat I still only understand 1/3 or 1/2 of the names/terms. Nevertheless, I have read some lengthy tax code sections more than once in details... I do not cook like a French, and - oh - they cook really nice! :)

Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared to for instance Dutch writing.

As a French, English is my default language for most queries on the web, but it wouldn't cross my mind to look up for a recipe in English. I also find that we have a lot of good science/maths youtube channels.

> Why don't we just get in on the drug trade ourselves, undercut the dealers

That was tobacco, but they blew it by never going for alternatives nor providing healthier/better products. With the pharma knowledge we have now, we surely could have developed a legally acceptable drug with few enough downsides.

Otherwise, they are of course getting in on the drug trade, just not under the framework we'd want to:

https://www.brut.media/fr/articles/cocaine-11-policiers-juge...

> France is in decay with incompetent and unpatriotic governments for decades.

What are you on about? What does the "unpatriotic" bit have to do with anything?

> It is facing many issues but has lacked strong leadership courageous enough to put country first.

Right. What would "putting country first" mean? France is doing what it wanted to do for decades, which is consolidating European power to its advantage. Is that what you consider unpatriotic? If so, I have bad news for you: France is a great country, but absolutely does not have the resources for its ambitions on its own.

> If you follow French news you'll see many.

If you follow sources related to reality in any way you’ll see that some things are getting better and some things are getting worse. What does not change is the agitation about safety and security to make people afraid of their own shadow, even as the situation is quite clear: the country is safer than it has ever been.

You have a valid point hidden somewhere, it’s that the people were shortchanged and that inequality is rising. You are badly misguided if you think that this has anything to do with patriotism. In fact, the people pushing this narrative have their own interests to look after in the class struggle. They might make you think that they have the same enemies as the people but they are just looking after their own. Just look at any country in which the local nationalists came to power.

I live in France for the last 5 years. Been to many places in the world. France is OK overall.

You don't know how organized crime families are nowadays in France. French gangs are led by 3 "families". Or rather, 3 groups of families who now are friendly with each other and divided their territory nicely and stopped fighting each other ~7 years ago. You might catch some minor gang member trice removed from the Hornec (And i've heard the Hornec are not the leading family, too exposed, so i would guess getting to the true boss is even harder), but you won't catch any leader like this.

Even it would occupy them 20% of their time, the issue with such a backdoor is what it can do to non-criminals (ex: loose the backdoor to an enemy nation state that would allow spying on all citizens, or allowing some party to eliminate opposition).

I always find this "war on drugs" strange, considering they are so many buyers to make it worth. Annoy/treat/educate/understand the buyers, if enough people want something you will not make it go away by reducing supply. Or make it legal and make money from it as a state...

I would argue that organized crime benefits from economies of scale - and that's what they're saying this might somehow alleviate. It's really not that hard to find one OSS e2ee app that is only updated for severe security issues when you have millions flowing through.

Your assertion that criminals are idiots or lazy might hold true in the case of the high school weed dealer but i'd argue strongly against that case for the international drug trade or traffickers. The more sophisticated the crime, usually the more money, the more incentive to keep it hidden. These laws aren't written about weed dealers, they're written about traffickers. The justifications are always the high level traffickers and related peoples, the people most likely to be locked down anyways.

And besides all that, let's invoke the slope, would you install a camera in your home? Even if you would, are you willing to force that upon every other person, regardless of their feelings or wishes?

Sure, let's think of the children. Can we also think of the potential future regime jailing/torturing all their political opponents? Why must we always be asked to think of only one side of the harms?

Then the criminals will just talk in person about all the information they downloaded about us. ;-)

Governments around the world do not want to stop at the identifiable target. They'd like to imitate the US and China, obtaining special deals with service providers that allow them to collect summary statistics and identify individuals computationally from the total of all communication.

Here are a few uses for total surveillance:

1. Public opinion can be monitored on a much more objective level than polling provides.

2. Discontent can be identified long before potential protestors are aware of others who share their views.

3. People whose views are significantly outside the usual range can be picked out and targeted in advance of any crime, even when no crime would occur.

4. Serious attempts at labor or protest organization can be resolved into definite schedules with more basis for comparison to other events than the participants themselves have access to.

5. There would be no more electoral surprises.

From this list, you may notice that states that are presently democratic have even more of a use for this capability than the others.

There are still methods that are unbroken.

Onetime pad: messages are encrypted using an key that has the same length as the message

An enigmalike machine: the enigma has some problems, but that can easily be fixed. If someone uses more complicated keys than AAA they should be safe from reading the messages.

I feel like they would reserve this type of hack to international criminal organizations (plus terrorists and bad countries) but not for smaller fish.

Judging by post 9/11 airport security SOP, if an alternate means of mass transport had been as fast as air travel, America would have banned commercial flights forevermore on 9/12.

The only benefit E2EE messaging offers the public over partially encrypted messaging is a lower chance of being spied upon. That's nice, but intangible.

Yes, if you care about forward secrecy then pgp is not a good solution.

> Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain markets than violate their security

You still need to rely on a third party's goodwill to keep that promise. Also even if they are willing to keep the promise it is possible that they won't be able.

The CNIL is doing a ton of work to limit private databases and cross-checking as well.

It can be hard to believe from more business focused countries, but the agency setting precedents has had dissuasion effects, and most companies do end up caring about their data retention and management policies. I've been in enough meetings where UX proposal gets entirely reworked because of a simple link to the CNIL's guidelines.