I don't find any of this persuasive because nowhere does it articulate who or how the defendants came to be accused of anything in the first place. I can not make my mind about how to feel when the context is removed, even if I think the state's argument is entirely specious.
I think La Quadrature du Net don't consider it relevant whether the accused are guilty or not; they don't want encrypted communication to ever be included in the evidence against someone.
I agree that that's a bit too much binary thinking, and a collection of separate actions that would be legal on their own can nonetheless add up to evidence of a crime when taken together.
Because political advocacy is a passionate business, people sometimes forget basic tents of communication and end up publishing jeremiads that are only comprehensible to people who already agree with them, while failing to convert anyone else to their cause. I quite agree about the overreach of the French state here, but on first encounter I couldn't make head or tail of what their passionate opponents were arguing about.
Was contracted to a New Zealand government department and all the Edge browsers had AdBlock installed by default. I guess the New Zealand government that I worked for is a terrorist organisation. The department that I worked for did take other peoples money though. (Won't give any more information than that).
Not only France. As was always predicted to happen, governments are finding the allure of classifying undesirable organisations as terrorists too hard to resist. The UK with Palestine Action, the USA with the Muslim Brotherhood [0].
We need to repeal the War Against Terror acts that allow this to happen.
I wonder what danger there is in over-classifying terrorism.
If someone, as a purely theoretical example, feels as if they fall under various 'modern' classifications of terrorist, then it could break down certain walls of reasoning preventing them from participating in activities that would fall under the 'historic' classification of terrorist.
What I'm saying is: Any government that's over-using the term is (potentially) actively participating in the radicalisation of a portion of their constituency.
And that is a dead-fucking-wrong approach; 180 degrees away from the correct heading. Gross negligence.
Another fun one: Signal is the No. 1 downloaded app in the Netherlands. But why? | TechCrunch, from March 2 2025
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41483581
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/1j38sgw/signal_is_t...
I agree that that's a bit too much binary thinking, and a collection of separate actions that would be legal on their own can nonetheless add up to evidence of a crime when taken together.
Because political advocacy is a passionate business, people sometimes forget basic tents of communication and end up publishing jeremiads that are only comprehensible to people who already agree with them, while failing to convert anyone else to their cause. I quite agree about the overreach of the French state here, but on first encounter I couldn't make head or tail of what their passionate opponents were arguing about.
Seems a modern problem is the significant watering down of what "terrorist" means. If blocking ads has become three measure of a terrorist:
If everyone's a terrorist... No one is.
The word no longer has any meaning. Eventually there will be two labels to apply to everyone: "corporate sheep" and "terrorist".
In which case I will always strive towards terrorist.
WTF is going on with France?
We need to repeal the War Against Terror acts that allow this to happen.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/11/desi...
If someone, as a purely theoretical example, feels as if they fall under various 'modern' classifications of terrorist, then it could break down certain walls of reasoning preventing them from participating in activities that would fall under the 'historic' classification of terrorist.
What I'm saying is: Any government that's over-using the term is (potentially) actively participating in the radicalisation of a portion of their constituency.
And that is a dead-fucking-wrong approach; 180 degrees away from the correct heading. Gross negligence.