{"id":9423,"date":"2015-06-25T06:14:26","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T11:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9423"},"modified":"2015-06-25T06:14:26","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T11:14:26","slug":"if-you-cant-beat-em-france-up-in-arms-over-nsa-spying-passes-new-surveillance-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=9423","title":{"rendered":"If You Can’t Beat ‘Em: France Up in Arms Over NSA Spying, Passes New Surveillance Law"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If You Can’t Beat ‘Em: France Up in Arms Over NSA Spying, Passes New Surveillance Law<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"Featured<\/div>\n

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On Wednesday, France woke up to find that the National Security Agency had been snooping on the phones of its last three presidents.<\/p>\n

Top secret documents\u00a0provided by Wikileaks<\/a>\u00a0to two media outlets, Mediapart and Lib\u00e9ration, showed that the NSA had access to confidential conversations of France\u2019s highest ranking officials, including the country\u2019s current president, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande;\u00a0the prime minister in 2012, Jean-Marc Ayrault; and former presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac.<\/p>\n

Yet also today, the lower house of France\u2019s legislature, the National Assembly, passed a sweeping surveillance law. The law provides a new framework for the country\u2019s intelligence agencies to expand their surveillance activities. Opponents of the law were quick to mock the government for vigorously protesting being surveilled by one of the country\u2019s closest allies while passing a law that gives its own intelligence services vast powers with what its opponents regard as little oversight. But for those who support the new law, the new revelations of NSA spying showed the urgent need to update the tools available to France\u2019s spies.<\/p>\n

Of course, the fact that the NSA is listening to the conversations of French presidents is not that surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to the revelations in the past two years of NSA spying, nor is the idea that France might do the same to its allies. In 2013, the German newsmagazineDer Spiegel<\/em>\u00a0revealed that the U.S. government had targeted the\u00a0cellphone of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel<\/a>\u2014so why not Hollande\u2019s phone, too?<\/p>\n

The response from the French government today was firm but predictable. Senior intelligence officials will travel to the U.S. to meet their counterparts in Washington, while the U.S. ambassador in Paris was summoned to the Elysee Palace. A similar scenario played out in 2013, when\u00a0Le Monde published Snowden documents<\/a>\u00a0that revealed some of the extent of American surveillance in France. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said today that he wants a \u201ccode of conduct<\/a>\u201d to guide the relationship between France and the U.S. on intelligence activities\u2014but the government demanded the exact same thing almost two years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em: France Up in Arms Over NSA Spying, Passes New Surveillance Law On Wednesday, France woke up to find that the National Security Agency had been snooping on the phones of its last three presidents. Top secret documents\u00a0provided by Wikileaks\u00a0to two media outlets, Mediapart and Lib\u00e9ration, showed that the NSA had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6709,333,2444,551,577,6708,765,5567,827,880],"class_list":["post-9423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-chirac","tag-france","tag-hollande","tag-national-security-agency","tag-nsa","tag-sarkozy","tag-surveillance","tag-the-intercept","tag-united-states","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9423"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9424,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9423\/revisions\/9424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}