[happyscrappy]

>That's their angle: use the panopticon to get blackmail material on 100% of people, then anyone who is inconvenient or needs to be controlled can be dealt with painlessly.

Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.

[cryoshon]

I didn't say that they were totalitarian, merely that they had taken a step in that direction. Powers are abused, 100% of the time, even if you don't find out. Steps against free society add up.

[hokkos]

Terrorist violences is also against free society.

[staunch]

Criminals do much more actual harm to society, and yet no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.

Imagine how many crimes local police could prevent if they did have access? Unlike finding small terrorist cells among tens of millions of people, busting local criminals is very easy if you can spy on their communication.

They could probably save thousands of children from serious abuse. They could definitely save some people from being murdered.

And yet, it's still not worth it because we would be living in a police state, not a free society.

[mason240]

>Criminals do much more actual harm to society, and yet no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records.

They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.

[gknoy]

> > no is calling for local police to have access to everyone's email and phone records. > They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.

That's because there are serious problems with police accountability. Citizens benefit because bad police (which we hope are a minority) are discouraged from acting poorly, due to pervasive evidence, and the police benefit because there is a clear documented record of What Happened, which helps prevent spurious claims of police misconduct.

It's something that most of the police seem not to want, judging from reactions towards journalists and people with cameras, so it's not the __police__ asking for more surveillance. (Well, I mean, they are, but not in this way.)

[staunch]

There may come a point at which police officers have such powerful gear (see: spider drones from Minority Report) that they can effectively monitor the population, but that's nowhere close to what we have with current bodycams.

"Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance

[happyscrappy]

>to get blackmail material on 100% of people

Nonsense.

[victorNicollet]

We had an example not even a month ago. In many cities, there are enough parking spots for everyone, so many citizens will leave their cars for the night near their homes in places where they do not cause significant disturbance, and the police will tolerate this behavior and not ticket them for it. This is a win for everyone: the citizens have a spot to park, and the mayor doesn't have to spend public funds to set up parking spots.

In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years.

And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job".

http://www.leparisien.fr/beauvais-60000/beauvais-des-pv-pour...

Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.

[CPLX]

> Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.

Which, not coincidentally, is the entire basis for the war on [some] drugs [when used by some people].

[dalke]

That sounds more like a work-to-rule labor action than an example of harassing dissenters.

"This is a win for everyone"

Except as you pointed out, it's not a win for everyone all the time.

[subway]

Hardly.

Thanks to a spectacularly complex legal system, we all break plenty of laws each day. If our every action is recorded, then so are those currently inconsequential violations of law, giving whoever controls the panopticon the ability to pick and choose who to prosecute with near impunity.

[api]

Why? If laws are so complex that at any given time anyone is breaking at least one, then a surveillance dragnet gives you cause to indict anyone at any time.

[rasz_pl]

We are talking about a country that routinely acts like a terrorist organisation. Look up who blew up Greenpeace boat ~30 years ago.

[AnimalMuppet]

One incident 30 years ago != "routinely".

[gotchange]

France is not totalitarian, at least for now, but their political system is statist with a tendency for enacting authoritarian policies without regard for individual liberties.

I have been following a lot of French people on Twitter following the terrorist attacks and I didn't sense from them any caution or worries of giving the govt and security forces a carte blanche with the state of emergency and even for the upcoming constitutional referendum.

They seemed very naive and trust their government blindly to the point of trading their freedom for the illusion of safety and not learning the hard lesson endured by their American peers with the Patriot Act and the ensuing mass surveillance following the 9/11 attacks.