So the people who made the law don't have to worry about this happening to them. How charming.

-From the article - "Further, the law excludes certain people from surveillance, including doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges, and French legislators."

The fact they exclude themselves is the ultimate show of bad faith.

france is slowly but surely turning into an authoritarian regime.

People voted against the extreme right to fight against "fascists" but it seems like it's coming anyway, disguised as a cool looking mid 40 guy.

As crazy as it sounds, I second that sentiment. France is turning fascist. Like for real. As a not entirely white guy, you have no idea the crazy stories I have to tell already and it just keep escalating.

We're all curious. A century ago, a few years before WW2, there was a mysterious and massive spike of hard crime in Germany, then it turned authoritarian and the rest we know.

See above comment to get an idea of what its like in 2023.

I've got no idea what the other guy is insinuating but I do want to hear some of your stories. This stuff is hard to follow from abroad

This includes cars regurlarly charging at me (yup, with various schemes, from I pass 5 cm from you to I try to kill you outright because nobody is watching), constant harassment wherever I go, some insurance director calling me home at night to insult me, post office person destroying my parcel, townhall person insulting me while getting election pass, and on and on. The frequency of it is: if i leave home, there is 50% chance something happens. Most of the time, a "sentinel" person or two just stares at me without interuption with some various degree of hatred eyes. Sometimes it's worse - though "sentinels" are very violent psychologically actually. Note a person during a strong hatred rush has eyes turn ink black. Entirely ink black with no white.

Fun times.

I believe the French call it ennui, /s. Also, the black eye thing is terrifying. Those guys are in full-blown Fight mode. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug

I have to ask, do you see the same behavior towards others around you?

No you don't.

> Note a person during a strong hatred rush has eyes turn ink black. Entirely ink black with no white.

Totally black sclera? Your fictional anecdote has now "jumped the shark."

More like scélérats :)

The racist behavior and hate are indeed a huge part of the problem. I believe you when you say it's escalating, however this one is relatively well known and not specific to France.

My feeling is a bit broader than that : we're entering a generalization of violence at every level of the society, including the state. This last part is the one that worries me the most, because state is supposed to be a cooldown actor.

What happened on the contrary, is that macron's government has decided to "show action", and "tacle the real issues of the country, without taboos". Which may have started with a good intentions, but is turning into a mess of laws turned against the people, mostly in the form of population control.

To me, to most striking example was what happened during covid with lockdowns, and public shaming. And the worst is that the population generally agreed because it was "for the people's own good".

Same thing is probably going to happen now. They'll strike with a new set of measures attacking public liberties, but since it'll be presented as anti-riot measures, the population will probably accept them.

Note that this isn't particularely new. The US set the examples with post 9/11 laws that basically threw the constitutionnal values to the trash provided it was vaguely presented as helping fight against terrorism.

I agree with you on the end result except I dont think any president has anything to do with that. It's little known but the president has actually little power and things move forward more or less the same regardless of who he is.

My view is that we let KYC be and once you have KYC, video surveillance is just more or less the same so why not do it.

And by KYC I mean KYC for the people. KYC for big accounts is justified. KYC for the average Joe, it's just surveillance.

Once you have that, video is just around the corner.

Right? Isn’t this the same France that just mentioned blacking out internet access?? Wtf guys.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36616037

Prediction Suddenly all new crime laws in France will have a mandatory 10 year minimum sentence…

We called them a tenner.

France is doing everyone a favor by saying the quiet thing out loud. If previously saying your phone or your car can spy on you on demand would draw accusations of paranoia, now you can point to France.

Hey, French citizen. Why don't you have a phone with a built in camera? You're not a criminal, are you? \s

> French lawmakers have given French police the legal authority to spy on suspects by remotely activating cameras, microphones, and GPS location functionality on a person’s smartphone and other connected devices

And, technically, how are they going to do that? Oh, wait, maybe the tech already exists, is already operational and is already used by other nation states? It may be a "feature" of all our Android and iOS smartphones.

BTW if it's not I don't know how France actually plans to implement that.

At least they're open about it. In the USA we pretend it's not happening

Do you have any links for the claim? That would be interesting to learn.

If I were a lawmaker in France I would probably not do this, because I have heard of some of the history of France.

Okay, but how? I didn't know there are idiots like these other than the Iranian government.

While the headline concentrates on the camera, it's the microphone we should really worry about. Cameras are easy to conceal. But there's no way to reliably disable microphones. And the most personal and possibly incriminating information is in someone's speech.

The accelerometer/gyroscope information is possibly even worse. It has been shown that speech can be reconstructed from their signal. What makes this bad is that even apps which are not authorized to access microphones are liberally given access to them. Even worse, they give additional information of a person's habits like sleep cycles, physical activity, health and driving.

This is incredibly surprising to me.

When I visited Paris over a decade ago, I was nearly assaulted on multiple occasions by Parisians for taking photos of buildings and other interesting things. They mistook my photographing as taking photographs of them without permission, and were quite upset and adamant about it being illegal.

Fortunately I'd just show them the photos on the lcd (OG canon powershot w/CF woot) and they'd chill out when they weren't in them...

How their streets aren't full of burning cars and protestors fighting police over this is beyond me.