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[dupe] French Assembly to allow remote police surveillance via phone cameras and mics (engadget.com)
116 points by mysterypie on July 7, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 108 comments



So, this is why Edward Snowden takes out the microphones out of his phones manually.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/when-edw...


But soon is going to be obsolete if you have wifi at home...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250


the highlighted thing is a microphone? i can't find anything about it googling for "s1457 4257". usually this leads you to specs etc.


> the highlighted thing is a microphone?

It's a typical SMD MEMS microphone, yeah

> i can't find anything about it googling for "s1457 4257".

That's because "1457 4257" is that particular unit's Job Identification Number, and the "S" at the beginning indicates that it's a production unit rather than a test or sample. There's no part identifier on it.


how is it exposing a membrane? it looks like solid piece of plastic.


There's a hole in it, you just can't see it from that angle. Bottom port mics, where the hole is in the underside of the package and there's a matching hole in the PCB to allow sound in, are more common (and typically perform better) than top port mics, where the hole would be visible from the top side of the package. Both kinds do exist though.


interesting. i lack the competence to solder around on a smartphone pcb. would it be sufficient to just poke the hole with a needle or drop a small amount of super glue i/onto it?


Probably. There's a membrane past the hole that you can destroy and I doubt the mic could function well enough to worry about if you punctured it. But I usually just crush the whole mic package with pliers when I need to remove one. They pry off the board pretty easily in my experience.


Man are they really going to go through with this??

I’m not even sure what I would do if I was in that situation, where my own government decided it was okay to spy on everyone that way. I’d probably be eying the nearest border.


After a quick chat with regular (non-tech) people, they're fine with it. The main reason being that "they can't just do that, they need a judge to sign off on it". They do seem a bit unsurprised that the politicians carved out an exception for themselves ("of course they did").

People here still seem to have faith that the institutions generally work as intended.


No, the politicians and the state have just isolated themselves effectively enough from the riots. The riots are the only thing people can do to protest a number of measures, most seriously the changes to the pensions. These riots (and "riots", not all are violent, and I haven't heard at all of these rioters damaging people) don't affect the state much, but they affect regular people plenty. Torched cars. Destroyed shops. Nonfunctioning services.

Police stations are now fortresses, as are most of the government departments. The state has made a definite choice: the hard hand, no help, and absolute priority to their own protection. Normal crime, like theft from stores, what people want the state to work on, is not even prosecuted anymore. You'd have to steal from a big store, in the city center, while an agent is there to have any chance of getting arrested (only youngsters, whom they can arrest indefinitely without evidence and convict even when innocent, ever get persecuted. Of course, the lack of evidence standards in cases against minors raise the question exactly how often these convictions (sorry "protection measures", not convictions) are fabricated. Let's just say the relation between police and youngsters is strained for some reason).

People want this to stop, and so they want more protection of the state. The French state, of course, could be said to have been less than effective in stopping these riots and the destruction. People, including representatives, are just point blank assuming this will help the police to be effective.

That the police is the cause of the riots does not seem to make a big impression. "Do not shoot people moving away from you in the face" is clearly to much for the police to handle. When you ask people "what else would you want people to do?" there are no answers, because especially nobody wants the obvious option: another long-term national strike.

Ironically the state has done nothing but grow. This is the fundamental conflict: everyone has to "save" (especially people who can't), but not the state. With inflation people have to spend ~11% less, effectively. The state has decided their absolutely necessary expenses will not even have to return to pre-pandemic levels.

People want protection, that's why this gets approved. But the state, where they believe to get this protection, is the direct cause of most of the problems people face.


>People want protection, that's why this gets approved.

You're missing the most important detail: especially in Western/Northern Europe, people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk. Europeans aren't just lazily asking for protection, they simply weren't raised to defend themselves from trespassers and assailants without the thought of potentially suffering consequences (even if it is just defamation).

Of course these people are going to beg the state to do it, handing over whatever privacy or independence they believe not needed. They don't know any better. They've been raised on 'knives will be used against you' from toddler age.


> people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk

We are still waiting for an example of a sane society where the opposite is true.


We are still waiting for example of sane society.


Meanwhile in this instance the police caused the riots by first beating someone with their gun and then shooting a person ...


To people downvoting: please do add a comment with an actual example.

Make HN Great Again!


> You're missing the most important detail: especially in Western/Northern Europe, people are taught from childhood on that the state is there to protect you, and protecting yourself is a risk.

Yeah, and we call that “civilization”.

If you cannot rely on the state for security, then you're basically living in the contemporary version of the pre-modern world (South America bas manu good examples of that, but the US isn't really, people do rely on 911 more often than not)


The issue with relying on the state for protection is that it works only as long as most of the society goes about its business in a civilized way.

Once enough people realize that "the state" can't be everywhere at once and start committing crimes, things start to break down.


> Once enough people realize that "the state" can't be everywhere at once

That's a (ideologically driven) myth though: if there's just one thing to learn from the twentieth century, it's that even with limited available technologies, a State that wants to be everywhere, can be everywhere, and it's only getting more true as technology advances[1]. And NSA alone collects enough information today to be able to solve the large chunk of unaddressed crime in most of the developed world, it's just a matter of political will regarding resource allocation (with a little bit of Baumol's cost disease, but it's not the main factor at play).

Having a state that is effectively everywhere is of course not something desirable either (again, the lessons from the past century) but the state abandoning its role is a politically constructed situation (it's what you get when laissez-faire becomes a religious theme).

[1] and it fact, it is because the reach of state steadily increased during the early-mid modern period that we've reached the current state of things. It's not that people haven't yet learned that the state cannot be everywhere, it's that states spent several century building the ability to be everywhere, which in turn led to this confidence from the population (and unfortunately to totalitarism sometimes…)


As opposed to what in the United States? Anyone advocating for a reduction in the authority of law enforcement is pretty quickly relegated to the fringe of either party or actively beaten down depending what the conditions call for (the American public couldn't rubber-stamp the patriot act fast enough).

As far as property crime against businesses is concerned, we absolutely should be telling people it's a risk to intervene. We should actively dissuade drugstore clerks from risking life and limb to stop someone from stealing a cart of sudafed in exchange for minimum wage at will employment with no benefits.


It's quite funny that you take a theft from a store as your example but I am not so sure this is something "normal people" care about, only store owners. Especially when impoverished "normal people" rely on shoplifting to get clothes and food on the table. Stores are not a one person venture or family owned anymore, a franchise at best or part of big group. They're capital. Most "normal people" don't own capital in my little corner of the world I guess most of us see normal people as a collection of our self.

As a normal person, I don't care about petty shoplifting but I would expect from the state for example to investigate murders.They're poorly investigated in general because they are hard to clear and you can't put them in your stats whereas arresting a youngster and taking his weed counts as a solved case.


I think "normal people" will very much care about shoplifting when they see that prices go up to cover for that. Or, even worse, when store owners figure they can't be profitable in some area and go away altogether.

I think people keep on thinking that "the rich" feel they have some kind of moral obligation to help them. As we've seen time and again, they do not. And they will even go out of their way to protect their money. See all the fiscal arrangements they set up to "optimize" taxation.


> I think "normal people" will very much care about shoplifting when they see that prices go up to cover for that. Or, even worse, when store owners figure they can't be profitable in some area and go away altogether.

How and when are they going to see that ? In my country, there newspapers headlines about how supermarkets have egregious margins. Is this true ? I don't know, but they don't mention shoplifting in the articles.

> I think people keep on thinking that "the rich" feel they have some kind of moral obligation to help them. As we've seen time and again, they do not.

The rich do not have a moral obligation to help us but they do have a legal obligation to pay their taxes and give back to societies they live in and benefit from like everyone else.

I am not sure it's moral obligation but they could also have the decency to stop spending so much money in lobbying, politics and information campaigning in order not to pay their due proportionally to what they own. Is this not accurate anymore : https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w...


> How and when are they going to see that ? In my country, there newspapers headlines about how supermarkets have egregious margins. Is this true ? I don't know, but they don't mention shoplifting in the articles.

Where I live, shoplifting is a "sensitive" political issue, so it's very unlikely companies will cite it as such. But in the US, people are seemingly more open about it:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/06/walmart-ceo-says-shoplifting...

https://torontosun.com/news/world/walmart-closing-up-shop-co...

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/worker-closing-dow...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11965589/The-stores...

> The rich [...]

Sure, I agree with your points, but they don't matter that much for the present discussion about stores closing.


Law enforcement that can't or won't police shoplifting can't or won't deal with anything more significant either.

Even putting that aside, are you seriously in favor of people stealing just because it's from Big Corp(tm)? Because the victims are the 1%?

Please re-contemplate exactly what you are arguing for, because small frustrations add up and are ultimately what topple societies and countries. Those shoplifters aren't Robin Hood.


> Law enforcement that can't or won't police shoplifting can't or won't deal with anything more significant either.

It seems that's just your opinion. There's no reason that it is the case least you think policing depends on the will of individual police and not of the objectives of the department. Policing shoplifting isn't even the same job as investigating homicide or market crimes.

> Even putting that aside, are you seriously in favor of people stealing just because it's from Big Corp(tm)? Because the victims are the 1%?

> Please re-contemplate exactly what you are arguing for, because small frustrations add up and are ultimately what topple societies and countries. Those shoplifters aren't Robin Hood.

Someone shoplifting to put food on one's table and clothes on one's body is a Robin Hood, it's just that taker and the receiver are the same person :) I don't think it should be legally but provided it is to feed and clothe yourself and not say resell, I don't think it's morally wrong either.

Sure inability to enforce the law does topple societies, but the inability for people to fill their basic needs does too, the lack of accountability of people in power even more.


The most common sentence I keep hearing over the years is "I have nothing to hide". This is sad but that's the reality we live in. Whether people can trust the institutions, having an "official" backdoors to your devices makes it obviously easier to others individuals with actual bad intentions to exploit them.


That's true, but the issue is that people aren't technical enough to realize this. They're told "don't worry! only we, the good guys, have that access!". So, since the people are in a stance of default trust towards the institutions, it makes sense for them to believe this. Plus, why would some bad guy try to hack grandma's mailbox? She has nothing of interest there, anyway!


> People here still seem to have faith that the institutions generally work as intended.

People everywhere still seem to have faith that the institutions generally work as intended.


Yes, in China majority are fine with their gonvermnent. Even most Russian's agree with Putin. No wonder that political obedience is common when most people in society has conformity behavior.


> my own government decided it was okay to spy on everyone that way

Most have already decided it's okay, and they do it through their intelligence agencies. This is an expansion in scale through LE agencies.


The US and UK do this too, intelligence agencies routinely break the law with no consequences.


This is an escalation of the intelligence over-reach because the Police are a much more intrusive force on everyday life.


You government (wherever that may be save a few places) is very likely already doing it, they're just being very discreet about it instead of making it the law of the land.


where do you live that you are so certain this isn't already done?


The US could already do that more more than 20 years already, it's nothing new, they are just catching up, crime these days is very well organized and tech savvy, they have to adapt somehow


Just because your neighbour is doing morally questionable acts, doesn't mean you are getting carte blanche for you. So your first argument doesn't hold.

Your second argument might hold but you are not providing anything. I reject the premise that criminals are more tech savvy than regular citizens.

I would be more likely to support this law if somehow i was proved it wouldn't be used against peaceful ecologists and Macron protesters.


I'm not saying that

All I'm saying is before you complain about your neighbor, clean your own house


You in twenty years:

“China could already do social scoring more more than 20 years already, it's nothing new, they are just catching up, crime these days is very well organized and tech savvy, they have to adapt somehow”


You do have a social score if you live in the US. Your credit score is a score on how well you fit as a cog into capitalist society.


I never understood why Americans are so willing to make debts. The last time I was in debt with my bank is 20 years ago when I was a student and the maximum was 400 Euro.


Some people like to have a fixed place to live…


They all can and already do it afaik.

This is just "allowing" them to actually use what gets collected in court instead of having to do so much parallel construction to pretend they can't.


FAR more concerning is https://www.senat.fr/leg/tas22-148.pdf page 43, second half, article 2212 first, second and fifth paragraph, a complete rewrite of a national defense law who add the possibility INSTEAD of just ordering domestic enterprises to prioritize war-related productions adding the power to requisition ANYTHING, private citizens properties AND their own bodies, just on a decree by Council of Ministers bypassing ANY other law.

Curiously so far only few extreme left and extreme right sites have pointed that out loud.

Meanwhile at the Parliament a nice intervention to "limit surveillance power" for connected sex toys https://twitter.com/Ugobernalicis/status/1676639024184786958

Welcome to the Summer 2023.


Is it still a free country if the prime minister can requisition anybody's property or services via a decree? It's declaring the State and the government to be above the people.


Does this not help temper the concern somewhat?

>Art. L. 2212-3. – Les mesures prescrites en application des articles L. 2212-1 et L. 2212-2 sont strictement proportionnées aux objectifs poursuivis et appropriées aux circonstances de temps et de lieu. Elles ne peuvent être ordonnées qu’à défaut de tout autre moyen adéquat disponible dans un délai utile. Il y est mis fin sans délai lorsqu’elles ne sont plus nécessaires.


Seems a bit like an empty statement, "autre moyen adéquat" seems a bit too vague and could just result in a "We tried nothing and we're out of ideas, let's apply article 2212-1"


Might be time for them to elect a nutter like Le Pen to swing it bit back the other way.


Not to be that guy, but if France were to enter a war/emergency situation, wouldn't that type of article be applied de-facto?

I guess the surprising part is that it's up to the Prime Minister to define "Emergency"?


De facto it's a totally different thing because means "locally" where the emergency is locally evident, not arbitrary declared by a handful of people.

Beside that in a Democracy only the Parliament can declare a state of emergency.


Remember how a year or so ago Makron talked to Putin face to face, when everyone else stayed away? Perhaps it was then Makron was infected with the spirit of fascism.


Next, they should make it unlawful to not carry a smartphone with you.


You jest but an eco-militant French association was dissolved last month for various reasons but among them :

- "le fait de ne pas communiquer les codes de déverrouillage de l'appareil ou de ne pas répondre aux forces de l'ordre en cas d'interpellation ; " // to not unlock your phone when police ask for it during an arrest

- "le fait de laisser son téléphone mobile allumé à son domicile ou de le mettre en « mode avion » en arrivant sur les lieux de la manifestation pour éviter le bornage, " // leaving your phone at home and go protesting in order to prevent from being geotagged


Mind you share that association name ?



Keeping in mind european attitudes to carrying ID - in some EU countries there are formal and informal penalties if you don't have it - this is not especially far fetched.


It’s obligatory in France. Until recently the french ID was comically large which led to men having to carry massive wallets which gave rise to the ubiquitous “man bag”.


There is no obligation to have, even less to carry, an ID card in France (in French : https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F11601).

But yeah, the previous card was ridiculously large.



For people who don't read French, yes on paper there is no legal obligation to have any kind of ID on you.

However, police forces are allowed to ask anyone their identity without any reason, and if they can't justify of their identity, they can be detained by the police for up to 4 hours for verification, and Police may requires them to do a fingerprint scan: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F1036


I assume women had their own, smaller, ID?


The point is that men now had to have a "purse" to carry the wallet that carried the ID.


You can use passport or driving licence which are smaller


I know about being required to have an ID (the case in Germany, maybe all of EU), what countries have penalties for not carrying them?

Also, the comparison is ridiculous.


This is not correct, eventhough sometimes falsly claimed even by police officers. You are obliged to posess an ID card once you turn 16 years old (§1 PersAuswG). But you don't have to carry it with you, eventhough it might complicate things e.g. should you be cought comitting a small crime. You need to have it on you, or another valid ID, when crossing the border though.


Uh, you agreed with me.


The ID is provided by the government for free, though. So I guess they will have to give you a phone for free, plus a free plan.


Western European here. ID is most definitely not provided for free.


In France, the ID card is free. Some other forms of ID (passport, ...) are not.


Imagine you are broke and have to go to jail because you can't pay for your ID because you are broke.


Both of mine cost €0 (two seperate countries). The third doesn't require I carry I'd (despite what the cops would often try and have you believe).


In France, you must always carry a means of identification with you. However, a friend who is able to positively identify you is enough (legally - but obviously police will challenge you).

However, ID is never controlled, and many live with OQTF (Order to leave the French territory).


Didn't France also make using encryption illegal a while ago?


Yes from 1986 to 1996-99. It is legal since then.

Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiffrement#En_France (in french)


French Republic v. Math


Ah, thanks


Slightly of topic, but they also make DNA tests to determine paternity illegal without the consent of the mother! I recommend all new fathers to do it quietly (without ruffling any feathers), costs basically nothing (< $200) as compared to the pain/devastation finding out 10-20-30 years later that the children you raised were not yours. Doesn't happen a lot, but can happen to anyone. In France you'll go to jail for doing this, or at least have to create a scene with your partner.


Australia's been pursuing it since 2018:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=i326eNOa6Us&feature=share7

Personally, I have nothing to hide. But I enjoy hiding as much as I can for the enjoyment of the technological challenge and also the absolute "Fuck You, Forever" to those sociopaths that want to control that which they have no natural right to control.


No ?


No mention of how this works on a technical level. Are they requiring phone manufacturers to put in a backdoor if they want to sell phones in France?


This law specifies the legal mechanism for activating the backdoor.

The backdoor will most likely be provided by tools like Pegasus.


Pegasus has nothing to do with backdoors, it uses security vulnerabilities.


Yes, manufacturers have always been bullied by large countries to either build in backdoors for inteligence agencies or be put out of business. This just legalizes existing tech I guess, but that doesn't make it any less bizarre that they decided to put it into plain sight.


Why does Apple (iPhone) and Google (android OS) enable this?


nothing they can do afaik. these capabilities are built in at the hardware level in the baseband processor.


they could make it easy to completely turn off that hardware so that it can't be used.


Apple compiles the baseband firmware itself, they have control and it’s really doubtful they’d allow the network to just listen in. This is more likely about the use of spyware that is installed on the phone using vulnerabilities in the OS.


Can't wait for the market to adapt with covers on the phone camera.


Hardware switches ubiquitous finally


Not if they're outlawed! Think of the children/terrorists!


"She'll get years for that. Off switches are illegal!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9AZZVnNw60


we had riots in france. the government let the riot go without doing much then they lied about the number saying it was a few thousands while anyone with a statistic 101 can tell its a blatant lie. last time we had similar people breaking everything at a soccer game and the ministry of interior told us it was english fans...

a while ago we had protest 'yellow vest' and protest against retirement age the government used police to massively destroy the people that were protesting many were left with lifelong disabilities. then we had the covid confinement where we had to have a paper to go out and average citizen where hunted and assaulted for not respecting it. and now we have people rioting and breaking businesses, hurting others in the streets with nothing to stop them.

it just doesnt make sense. to me it sounds like we are becoming a dictature where lies are pushed as facts, riots are pushed by the state and entertained to scare the average citizen, surveillance state is controlling us and any kind of protest is severely dealt with. france is becoming scary under macron. just like canada with trudeau, those two guys, young leaders that corrupt journalist pushed and love even tho they represent everything wrong in our country, those two 'modern leaders' they used wokism and green washing to move us further away from real democracies like switzerland. now we are a pink dictature.


Not surprised, it's a continuation of what happening since 2019 (it started a bit earlier, in 2009 to be exact, was reinforced in 2015, but each time with the intent of 'not going further' for both Sarkozy and Hollande).

I've discussed that with ecologists and union workers/socialists extensively. I'm not victim blaming, and some were in agreement, but it was obvious that if we accepted undue policing power to investigate Muslims and anarchists, or even royalists, soon enough the state would turn against any threat to its ideology, and the ecologists saw that recently. And once again, the state was smart, and only rural ecologists were illegally detained, the student/bicycles ecologists were left alone. Niemöller still isn't studied enough in Europe it seems.


> Niemöller still isn't studied enough in Europe it seems.

To this day Robert Paxton's works on Vichy France are still seen by many inside France as "controversial" and what have you, so measures like this one here are just what you'd expect coming from "republican" France.


Will listen-and-watch orders be send using operator cell-network or in-band using any OS-API through data-network ?


Israel has a somewhat similar law, as expected it didn't end up so well

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-police-use-of-nso-spywa...


All i see is that a few recommendations were made regarding some judicial over sight. Still doesn't end well for the public.


As if there was already not enough reasons to flee that god-forsaken place (see recent riots, one example among many), now parliament is busy manufacturing new ones.

Amazing.


News like this further make the case that the GPRD is mainly protectionist legislation that mainly benefits EU corporations. The EU doesn’t really care about the privacy of their citizens regardless of the virtue signaling.


Every multinational corp has to treat everyone a GPDR now if they have a single EU customer. There’s no affordable way for most to separate policies.


If you're going to critique it you might as well get the acronym right. It's GDPR, not GPRD.


No it doesn't.

EU is a large union of 27 countries. France is having a big authoritarian turn that started after the 2015 terror attacks, and it accelerated under Macron.

That law would certainly not pass in the majority of EU countries.

Additionally, even though I believe this law is terrible, you can't compare a for profit company collecting information on ALL its users, and a police service collecting information on a few thousands people after a judge allowed them to.


>you can't compare a for profit company collecting information on ALL its users, and a police service collecting information on a few thousands people after a judge allowed them to.

I'm not entirely sure about that. If data is legally collected by a company, who's to say the government can't legally purchase it for their own ends?


Under GDPR, if you process personal data, you are required to have a clear scope: which data, why, for how long is it retained, under which legal basis (articles 5 and 6), etc. Selling data later would be a misappropriation of legal basis.

More info here: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/r...


Interesting, that's good to know. What happens if the state decides to appropriate the data rather than sell it?


> That law would certainly not pass in the majority of EU countries.

Even for a specific purpose and specified people, approved by a judge?


Maybe I'm being too optimistic on the majority of them not approving such a law, but in many countries, notably Germany, I think that wouldn't fly, but I may be wrong.

As usual these laws start by being applicable to only terrorists, to make it easy to pass, and then years later their scope is extended...




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