Read the comments (if you can read french), and you'll notice that the reactions are all a sarcastic combination of "not surprised at all" and "that darn government probably didn't even get this right".
To sum up the differences:
- PRISM was legal. That said, in France, legal coherency is a joke. Laws conflict with each other, and even when voted, they may not be applied.
- There is an implied contract in the US that the government won't spy on citizens. Nobody believes that in France.
- As a result of the above, the people behind this "revelation" won't even be sued.
- French people tend to use services from abroad (mostly american, sweden and german), so the government doesn't have much leverage to get information from companies. I doubt they broke TLS. They do have a huge understanding with ISPs, however. Incidentally, ISPs are severely distrusted by their users.
All in all, our democracy is even worse than yours. Yes, that is possible.
Legal or not, it's our liberty they're taking away from us.
The people of the USA and France now feel powerless against our respective governments. We gave our votes to the executioners of our liberty.
Google, MS, Facebook, twitter and cell phone companies don't have facilities in France?
Here's the manual for the Amuses Eagle product, a French company: http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/amesys/99_eagle-glint-ope...
We've recently had revelations suggesting that several intelligence services are essentially grabbing as much communications data as they can. Why would anything think if the US are doing it and the UK are doing it that anyone else with a reasonable budget and level of technical capability isn't?
Moving forward (even prior to this but certainly now) the assumption should be that if a country has the resources to have an intelligence service which can do this, they're doing it.
With regards to this the most likely constraining factor for any intelligence service is money and resources rather than morality, legality or anything else.
EDIT: the point is that I don't believe that HN should be anymore knowledgeable about this than the General Public because it is a specialized domain. It's not 'the Internet'.
But you've got an interesting point in that the desire has always been to capture everything -- while the technical means to do it have been available for a couple of years. Along with a further shift in how people communicate towards easily moniterable technology, that is the crux of the matter.
It was one thing to have secret societies intent on capturing everything in the 60s, when technology limited the scope of the operation. It's another thing when that intention is not readjusted to the societal and technical realities of 50 years later.
That's why it seems like such a sudden, surprising change in policy to some who haven't kept up with the technical possibilities for surveillance, while others realize it's been a slow change going on for decades now.
And of course, for the past decades some of us have been trying to point out the technical possibilities to everyone who would listen, only to get told that just because it's possible doesn't mean it's being done -- we're not surprised by Snowden's leaks, but certainly vindicated.