Asymmetric Warfare 03: France cranks the rack

France makes the predictable fascist play

In VST’s first article in its Asymmetric Warfare series, we laid out some basics about how the state contains and beats down mob protest without lifting a finger in the moment or in the real world.

In the second of the Asymmetric Warfare series, VST specifically broke down the Merzouk killing and predicted what the outcomes would be.

6 hours ago, the French Senate confirmed both of VST’s Asymmetric Warfare articles to be correct in all aspects of the observations, predictions and recommendations it made regarding digital and communications technology use by the mob.

The National Assembly approved on Wednesday the possibility of activating mobile phones remotely to listen to and film people involved in organized crime and terrorism investigations. After the senators, MEPs validated this key article of the justice programming bill by 80 votes to 24, which has been examined at first reading since Monday at the Palais-Bourbon.

Members of the presidential camp, LR and RN voted in favor. Those of the Nupes voted against, like the president of the LIOT group, Bertrand Pancher.

Article 3 provides for authorizing the remote triggering of cameras or microphones of computers and other connected devices, such as telephones, without the knowledge of the persons concerned, with two different purposes. On the one hand, geolocation in real time for certain offenses. On the other hand, the activation of microphones and cameras to capture its images and images, which would be reserved for cases of terrorism and organized crime and crime.

The left is standing wind against these provisions « privacy intrusion », France rebellious ( LFI ) evoking a « authoritarian drift » and recalling the criticisms of lawyers or NGOs. Isolated in the presidential camp, Mireille Clapot ( related Renaissance ) also estimated that there was a « disproportion » between the aim sought and these measures, a « eye that would monitor us ».

But for the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, « there are people whose lives we will save » : « We are far from the totalitarianism of 1984 », George Orwell's novel.

Le Monde

The French Senate has now formalised the draconian use of a citizen’s possessions in order to spy on them and anyone in their proximity via any connected camera, microphone or geolocation capability, without the target’s knowledge.

“But they can already do this!” comes the cry. Technically, it can already be done, but formal use of the means and the results in order to render legally enforceable outcomes such as arrest and incarceration are separate to being able to just do the thing. Sure, mobile phones without GPS or tracking software installed can be triangulated using two or three mobile phone cells (or equivalent). Using that information legally requires legislation. The French just made the legislation.

Some things to note:

• The Minister of Justice actually said, “there are people’s lives we will save,” and “We are far from the totalitarianism of 1984.” His first claim now requires ongoing monitoring, analysis and proof. It is VST’s bet that there will be zero lives saved attributable to this legislation, and likely there will be wrongful application of the powers that lead to aggravated circumstances in which people who are yet to be convicted of crime are either hurt or injured. His second claim is, by virtue of the fact he said it, proof that we are way beyond 1984, and have been for a long time. The level of state and private surveillance of the entire human race and the will to conduct such surveillance for unaccountable and unjustified means has never been greater. The Justice Minister’s statement is akin to when the bad man with the knife and gun, covered in blood and missing trousers is downstairs shouting, “I’m not going to hurt you.” Are you gonna come out of the cupboard?

• The majority by which this first reading was passed tells you what the French establishment is - a fascist authoritarian ruling elite.

• The claim that such insane powers are for terrorism, organised crime and crime covers every base. Simply state that you suspect someone of crime, go back through their entire online life to manufacture probable cause then commence on-person surveillance until you find something to pick them up for be that jay walking, littering, violently ignoring a screaming Karen and their pronouns, or uttering wrongthink out loud.

What’s the solution to this problem?

There are a few, mostly obvious partial mitigations.

1. Don’t do or say anything the state doesn’t like, and don’t keep company with undesirables. Be a good slave.

2. Abandon the aspects of your devices that enable surveillance and consciously replan how you use devices for what tasks, with what connectivity.

3. Revert to the simplest forms of tech you can, although even a simple Nokia burner without a camera could be used to track you and listen to you.

4. Abandon the notion of the Internet of Things and strip your home and personal environs of surveillance devices. Ask yourself how your life to date went without cameras watching you and all of your shit? For the vast majority, it went OK.

5. Politically object to these laws in your state, nation and across the EU. Campaign for their abolishment and raise awareness for an opposition campaign.

6. Support the development of new and different, open source and transparent device architectures, designs, Operating Systems and ecospheres.

The trouble is none of the above, in whole or in part, fixes the problem. The state is spying on you because it wants to spy on you and it has all the resources. When you percolate up the threat ladder, they go through your back catalogue of surveillance records and then mess with your shit. The above does not change this state of affairs.

Remember that device hacks are occurring at the hardware level in the chips, before the OS kicks in. Then the OS is hacked, then the apps are hacked. You, as a mere user, will know of none of these hacks at worst, and maybe only the app hack at best. Although the Android OS is open source and therefore ways that it can be hacked and subverted should be knowable to a wider spectrum of people outside of Google, that doesn’t mean that a given version of Android hasn’t been hacked. It just means that people can look at the code if they want to spend time doing so. White hat hackers might get paid for spotting weaknesses and identifying zero day hacks, but the reverse is true for black hat hackers. Also, apps are not open source, and neither is the hardware. Users literally stand no chance in this situation. iOS is not open source. State level hackers find vulnerabilities that they don’t help to fix. Good hacks are multifactorial and not obvious, which is why they exist and don’t get found in the design, development or testing phases.

The only marginal thing one could do is to use devices that have the physical means to shut off the microphone, camera and GPS capabilities until the user wants them on. Everything else is hackable. But such design choices are the compromise between security, convenience and paranoia. What you know is that the state wants to spy on you. That’s a fact, not paranoia. Whether you accept it and think it doesn’t change your life is up to you, but it likely does change your life even if it’s hard to identify or admit to. When people are spied upon, they change aspects of their behaviour and expression. That’s one of the reasons why the state spies on you then tells you it’s spying on you. In doing so, a lot of weak people conform even more strongly to the state’s desires, which is a form of policing and containment without consent. This should never be accepted by anyone, yet we are accepting all of this bullshit.

Democracy is a myth

What you are accepting is the reality that there is no such thing as democracy in any lay sense. There is only the whim of the masters who barely need any pretext to achieve their legislative goals. Literally any major event can be spun into a pretext to stamp on your face.

Any attack is an attack on democracy, even though that doesn’t exist. Any shout of objection is hate speech. All words are violence. Reality is not what you think it is, it’s what someone else tells you it is; that can be the state or a stranger telling you that they are a cat or a man or a woman - what you think doesn’t matter, only what you claim to believe and conform to matters now.

You know why the USA is under attack

The US Constitution is the reason why it is being destroyed from inside and out. As of this moment, a judge has just ruled that the state’s interactions with social media companies are violations of the first amendment and illegal, to be ceased. This is a block to the Censorship Industrial Complex exposed in the Twitter Files. Such a ruling has not been made in the other Five Eyes nations which do not have such clearly defined equivalents to the US Constitution and which are all more legally corrupt than the USA. But this doesn’t change the fact that the US Government has been breaking the law for years on just that one issue and is constantly breaking the law in ways barely understood, exposed, admitted to and legally addressed. The USA spawned the worst excesses of internal surveillance, despite its Constitution and contained mandate of CIA and NSA. If Facebook keeps its mouth shut about future conformance with the state’s censorship and/or changes how censorship is implemented, citizens won’t know because no one is empowered to look into it. Alphabet is literally manipulating each person’s experience of the internet and therefore the real world as well, and no one knows the full extent or means of that manipulation. Alphabet is unaccountable for it and the state sanctions it all, explicitly and implicitly. The Censorship and Surveillance Industrial Complex is not stopping just because a judge said “no”. It will simply morph and shift out of the limelight. An entire entity with independent powers and unprecedented transparency and unconstitutional powers of access would be required to determine whether the fascist corporatocracy is paying the judge any attention. You can bet it isn’t.

The situation for citizens will always be asymmetric. It’s simply a question of whether disadvantageous asymmetry can be overcome across multiple fronts, and whether the one advantageous asymmetry - sheer numbers - can ever be harnessed to rebalance things.

What the French have just illustrated again is that the ruling elite fully understands asymmetric warfare and is far further ahead of the mob, who remain divided, are prone to tantrums and lashing out at each other, and in doing so play straight into the hands of the ruling elite. However, the mob acts like this in part because the elite have spent decades forcing this paradigm and these outcomes.