I'd rather have Putin spy on me, than my own governement, or its allies. He has far less influence over my life, and I doubt that french and russian intelligence are cooperating.
I wouldn't be so sure, as France and Russia have a long, special history of diplomatic ties, dating as far back as when both were among the most influential countries of the Old World.
You guys build warships for Putin's war machine which is murdering civilians in Ukraine, something the French knew they were going to empower someday with arms like these. You don't buy helicarriers for defense, you buy them to easily attack your neighbors. Ties between these two nations go back hundreds of years. I would absolutely not assume the FSB and DGSE/DGSI aren't talking. I would assume they are bosom buddies.
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/russia-to-order-french-m...
Countries with militaries that enable each other have tight intel relationships. This French/Russia rivalry is non-existant.
I think we are between a rock and a hard place here. I'd be willing to use a VPN in a non-cooperating country to evade state surveillance, but it is hard to make sure that you don't fall prey to non-state (or even maybe state) actors.
One thing which I'm wondering is how can this go ahead if they want to stay aligned with EU regulation. Wouldn't such a move automatically violate the "Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC" ? [0]
If this moves forward I'll move the company to Germany because giving any more tax-Euros to such a government would feel like supporting a Stasi like apparatus. Also if this gets implemented then good luck for the future when Marie Le Pen's far right government gains further power in this economy (and they will because France is doing too little too late to recover from the mess they're in).
Also the standardization body (ETSI) which does a lot of the global technical specs (3gpp) for mobile and M2M is keeping quiet on the topic of building privacy into the standards. I have brought up the lack of privacy focus in several work groups but somehow this is not a topic that gets addressed at all. Mentioned chairmen are of course deeply ingrained in the telco industry which again is in bed with government. And from a sales/marketing perspective it's easier to build/sell features such as Lawful Interception (LI) or Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) rather than a product which refuses to do something (such as pass on private data)
The Charlie Hebdo team would turn in their graves if they'd know what kind of aftermath their deaths caused. It makes me sick beyond words.
Online.NET is a big TelCo as well fyi. They own http://mobile.free.fr/ etc.
But yeah, I've dropped my OVH/Online.net servers in favor of more Hetzner nodes with the exception of their S3 competitors [I just can't find any equivalent price/performance/availability]. That and I front end the S3 competitors anyway via a CDN over https which I think is fine with this legal framework [it just sniffs unencrypted traffic iirc]
If you are making that kind of switch and are looking for bootstrapping automation for bare metal nodes at Hetzner:
https://github.com/asconix/hetzner-bootstrap-coreos
https://github.com/rmoriz/hetzner-bootstrap
While the most preeminent french hosting and cloud providers (OVH, Online, Gandi, Alter Way...) have been quite vocal about the issue, none of the big french telcos (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) have said a single word about it. Shame on them!
900 tech companies, research organisations, and trade associations (so far) have asked the government to reconsider the law proposal (http://ni-pigeons-ni-espions.fr/en/), with not success, obviously. Several organisations I'm part of (including the two companies I have founded) where part of the movement, of course.
There is still some hope that the law will be modified, by the french Senate, or that it will be censored by the french Constitutional Council, or the European Court of Human Rights.
We also plan to start evangelising people on the use of VPNs.