[pp.int.general] news from France

[Valentin Villenave]

Hi everybody,

first of all I'd like to apologize for not having taken part in the
discussions on this list for the past few weeks, though I can assure
you I carefully read everything that's said here. When I see so much
brilliant people working, I just feel like I can't keep up -- which is
probably why I've been ill for a few weeks as soon as we came back
from Berlin :-)

Regarding the Manifesto discussions, I'd very much like to be part of
it but I have a lot of work to catch up with (having been ill); I hope
I'll have more time and more energy in March.

The Parti Pirate is still quite active; we have begun to use our
pirate CMS (codename CuPP, aka See you Pirate Party), and to begin
with, our developer Cyril had a nice idea : each couple of weeks,
he'll port one theme from another Pirate Party: right now we have
"pirated" the PPI theme (see http://partipirate.org), next week our
website will look like the Swedish one, and so on. Quite a nice idea
IMO.

Anyway, there are two issues I'd like to talk you about. Two pieces of
news: one bad, one good. Let's start with the good one.

Two days ago, the French committee that's in charge for gathering
levies (160 M€ last year), enforcing anti-copy repression, led by a
guy named Albis, well, this committee has... simply exploded :)
They were about to vote a new tax on smartphones (iPhone etc), and
suddenly the industrial firms representatives just got pissed; they
said they were'nt here to agree with whatever the Culture ministry
proposed, they said that their criticism was never taken into account,
they said this whole anti-piracy pretext for new levies on everything
was pure fraud, and they just quit.
Quite a funny scene actually.

Now for the bad news.
Ministry of culture Chistine Albanel, one of President Sarkozy's
maids, just published a new cool project: from now one, not only will
the ISP be forced to keep every connection logs, IP addresses etc;
they will also have to store *everything* that can help the police to
find terrorists, for a year. We're talking about:
- identity data (logins etc)
- pseudonyms you use
- your *real* address, date of birth, etc
- technical data: which software you used, etc
- *all* your passwords
- list goes on; you name it.

This is simply incredible. What's more incredible is that in this
beautiful thing some call a democracy, these new measures... never get
to be voted nor discussed in parliament! Indeed, in March 2007, the
parliament voted a "frame-law" that specified, to sum up: "terrorism
is bad, we need to fight terrorism". All Albanel had to do is to
present her proposal as an addendum to the law, a simple application.
So, it's likely to be applied any time soon; the control organizations
have all stated that they were against it, to which Albanel replied
(more or less): "Oh, really?... That's too bad... Err... OK, let's do
this anyway!"

We followed Rick's advice on this one: the information came out at
10AM, at noon I had written a PR, and this way we could get a quote
(and a link) in the Web edition of the first French daily newspaper.

in French:
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2008/02/20/le-projet-de-conservation-des-donnees-largement-conteste_1013774_651865.html?xtor=RSS-651865

Beware everybody: what's happening in France might well be your future too!


Cheers,
Valentin