France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone, spy on people
A bill that would allow police in France to spy on suspects by remotely activating cameras, microphone including GPS of their phones has been passed.
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Read the article. Title is clickbait. It's only with approval from a judge. You know, alternatively they could just arrest and imprison the person, which is what every country is doing. Not saying it's without worrying, but there's important nuance that most are missing.
P.S.
Absolute extremist attitudes like "nobody should be able" and so on, have absolutely no place in modern society. There's always nuance. Libertarianism doesn't work, and laws must be enforced. It sucks, but when there are forces that want to hurt people and destabilize societies, you can't go by the rule that everyone is a saint. The world will punish this attitude.
Yes, the world isn't perfect, but for ducks sake, quit sensationalizing anecdotes and representing them as "this always happens". That's dishonest.
So? Even with a warrant, thats not a power that people should have. No one, warrant or not, should be able to remotely activate your phone/camera/etc and monitor it. The fact that power exists means smart phones are an even bigger personal safety and privacy threat than they already were.. and if police can do it with a warrant, then there are gonna be people who figure out how to do it without one and for far more malicious reasons.
Ah yes it's ok to violate my rights, as long as a judge approves it.
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
If you are, what do you have against warrants? If someone kidnapped your friend and kept them locked away in their house. Don't you want there to be a way for the police to legally rescue your friend if they have evidence on where they are being held?
because warrant or not, no one should have the power to remotely turn on your camera/mic/etc without your knowledge and monitor it.
For me it's mostly against judges. Like judges that decide that because the victim of a rape doesn't remember the rape (because it was so horrible her brain blocked it out), the perpetrator should be free.
Or those judges that decide that there's not enough proof that a billionaire-owned chemical factory polluted a river that most of the fish died, even though there's only one chemical factory on the river that could have done it.
(Those both are local issues you probably haven't heard of, though I believe you've probably heard about many such cases)
Would you want any of those judges give a warrant to someone to spy on you?
I live in France. The government here is using every single tool they have to prosecute radical leftists and environmentalists while ignoring the fact that more than 60 % of the police force has fascist adjacent ideals. I do not want these people spying on me, period. This is not some libertarian horseshit, trust me.
Unfortunately extremely true... This guy calling an clickbait...
Whataboutism is a hell of a drug. I'm afraid people in many countries are so used to not having those freedoms that they look at us weird for trying to keep them.
i've even heard french say : its better to be poor and in security rather just be poor.
Its done. I dont trust society.
I get your opinion but you have to account for the fact that it's not Le Pen who's in the chair. And France is actually ranked quite high on the civil liberties. While I get your perspective, I believe that it's exaggerated.
Our ranking is unfortunately not getting any better, just look at what is currently happening with Les soulèvements de la terre.
I understand Le Pen would be worse, I truly do. I actually voted against her in the last two elections. But imagine Le Pen in power, which is very likely to happen soon, with all those legal framework already in place. She is going to have the mother of all field days.
You absolutely can find my view to be an exaggeration. Some part of me hope it is. But I'm quite worried about our future as a country right now.
Well it's good that you care. It's the multitude of opinions and open discussion, what makes a democracy work.
Unfortunately we have siloes of opinions, so you're pretty much either trying to yell in an echo chamber or at best, argue with a moderate like me. The moment you're faced with the people leaning right, some of the rhetoric might be scary for them, and they might retract further into their own silo, where more and more extremist views are tolerated.
The key to a functioning society, is moderation in enforcement of law (so that the state continues to be the only one who is able to, and expected to exert force), and understanding of each other so that it remains an open dialog.
I'm originally from a country where society has degraded into 2 irreconcilable camps, and it got to the point where I can't even stand my own parents because their echo chambers had lead them to extreme extremes. And I'm not the only one.
Right now what is paramount is a government that optimizes social well-being (think Finland), and the enforcement of those laws, because everyone from Putin (and the general club of autocrats) to fundamentalist fascists everywhere else, want to destabilize that right now. A prosperous democracy is a threat to all of them. Whether you like it or not, we are in the middle of an ideological war.
Well thank you for the thoughtful, respectful and engaging response.
I do not advocate for the state surrendering its authority, far from it. The problem lies, to my mind, within some very abuse prone legal frameworks that are currently being put into place. For example, in France, local "préfets" (which are unelected officials that act as local governors) have been steadily gaining more and more powers that cannot be democratically countermended, or at great expense: they can limit people's movements, forbid demonstrations, etc.
That could be seen as a necessary measure against the rising polarization you talk about (a point on which we agree btw, 100%), but then again whenever the far right happens to be the one doing the agitating, the préfets are suspiciously slow to act.
For example, in Paris, the prefet did not forbid a neo Nazi march ending in an Aryan rock concert whereas a week before that he had forbidden multiple démonstrations against Macron's pension reforms. And the list goes on. Our minister of the interior refused yesterday to condemn a police union campaign labelling rioters in Parisian suburbs as "pests to be eradicated". This is not moderate.
Macron is not really a moderate. He acts like one and manages to feel like one from abroad perhaps. But here he is more and more leaning towards the exact type of authoritarian doctrin a moderate should, as you do, strive to impede. And the thing is, his actions, and the general apathy of many towards them, are reinforcing Le Pen's chances come 2027. And that scares me.
I don't think you solve one problem by introducing another problem. The solution to over-criminalization is to decriminalize things. If a person is a danger to society, charge them with a crime and let a jury of their peers decide their guilt. Hacking into someone's property so that you can spy on them is absolutely not an alternative worth entertaining.
If the good guys can do it, even by the books, imagine what the bad guys can do.
Laws must be enforced, but not by treating privacy like a wet rag.
Persinally I hope we'll see some mainstream devices that comes with a hardware toggle for the mic and a manual privacy shutter for the cameras.
Keep in mind that privacy is really a recent concept. Human societies never had privacy before the industrial revolution. Everybody knew everybody else and what they were doing. I do want my privacy, but modern technology makes it too easy to create and grow any organization that can rival the state in power. While we do have the power to influence and control the state, we have no power over competing organizations that act like authoritarian states.
There needs to be a balance, an amount of power that the state can exercise, that's just right for keeping it as a monopoly on violence. Absolute privacy, where the state has transparency, is taking away all the power and advantages from the state and gives them to whoever wants to challenge that state.
In other words, nuance.
Uh huh, and if a rubber stamp judge gives wiretapping permission every time the cops ask for it?
Then your problem is the judicial system, isn't it?
I'm sure the judge will say no
Can we ban clickbait