Category Archives: Society

France, Government, Intelligence, National Security, Society, Terrorism, United States

Intelligence services in France gain new laws to eavesdrop…

FRANCE

The National Assembly in France has passed a new law allowing intelligence services to more freely eavesdrop.

The National Assembly in France has passed a new law allowing intelligence services to more freely eavesdrop.

The French parliament has passed a law which will provide state intelligence services with more freedom to eavesdrop. The controversial decree aims to target suspected terrorists.

The law, which was voted on by a simple show of hands from deputies in France’s National Assembly waivers the need for judicial warrants to use an array of spying devices including cameras, phone taps and hidden microphones.

Under the new legislation, French security officials will be able to place clandestine devices in suspects’ homes and beacons on their cars without prior authorisation from a judge.

Communication and Internet firms will also be forced to allow intelligence services to install electronic boxes to record metadata from all Internet users in France. The controversial law has been met with protests from privacy advocates and concern about US-style massive data sweeps. The United States passed a similar law in the form of the US Patriot Act following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

France’s ruling socialist government rushed through the bill earlier this year, shortly after the Islamist militant attacks in Paris, in which 17 people were killed over three days.

Despite the vote in France, the law won’t take effect, however, until a court rules on whether it abides by France’s constitution.

The news of the decree came as France reacted with outrage to revelations from transparency lobby group WikiLeaks that the US National Security Agency had eavesdropped on France’s three most recent presidents – Francois Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac.

Speaking on French television channel TF1, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange urged France’s leading politicians to launch a ‘parliamentary inquiry’ into the foreign surveillance activity. The anti-secrecy campaigner also said that other important revelations were in the pipeline: ‘I think from a policy perspective, what is to come is much more significant than what we have published so far,’ Assange said.

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Britain, Government, National Security, Russia, Society, Technology, Terrorism, United States

Russia funded cyber terrorists targeting West under guise of Islamic State…

CYBER TERRORISM

A cyber security expert has warned that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is funding Islamic State hacking groups which pose a serious threat to some of the UK’s largest organisations.

Richard Turner, President of EMEA, has claimed his firm has proof that a crack team of highly skilled hackers with links to the Kremlin are targeting UK energy suppliers, defence networks, financial and telecommunication companies.

Mr Turner also claims they are responsible for bringing down a major television broadcaster in France.

Islamic State (IS) cyber terrorists were cited as the source as TV5 Monde was taken off air and the websites of smaller companies were hit by pro-IS propaganda in April. Mr Turner says, however, that the attacks were not carried out by IS but by a troupe of cyber terrorists, known as the APT28 group, which he believes are being sponsored by the Russian government and are masquerading as IS.

The security chief warns that hackers could easily bring down a media organisation in the UK or US. Mr Turner said his company has been tracking the work of APT28 since 2007.

An analysis of the information and data within the cyber caliphate website during the French attacks has been identified as being the same online data used by ATP28 in the past.

Their motives, according to Mr Turner, could be to push the news agenda away from Russia or by spreading fear and disinformation. He said: ‘If you can disrupt broadcast media through a cyber-attack you get the upper hand in spreading fear and propaganda.’

Mr Turner says that such attacks have been present for a number of years now and that many firms and individuals are only starting to realise the extent of it.

Such reports come amid increasing tensions between the west and Russia. RAF aircraft have been deployed numerous times over the past few months to fend off Russian bomber jets that have made frequent incursions into UK airspace. Russia has also beefed up its nuclear weaponry in response to US government plans to base military hardware in Eastern Europe.

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Christianity, Climate Change, Environment, Government, Society

Pope Francis’s new climate-change doctrine and encyclical…

CLIMATE CHANGE

For more than a year, Pope Francis and his close advisors have been preparing an environmental stewardship document called Laudato Si. The text focuses on the effects of climate change on human life.

The document has been issued in the form of an encyclical, one of the most formal statements the pope can make about Catholic doctrine, and it’s the first of his papacy. Last spring, he released another piece of writing on the topic of poverty, but it was a slightly less formal document called an apostolic exhortation.

This, however, is the first instance in which the environment has been the topic of an encyclical. No pontiff has ever issued a statement (about the environment) on this level. John Paul may have put it into a World Day of Peace message, but a World Day of Peace message is down the rung on the ladder of the hierarchy of Catholic documents. Benedict, too, gave a number of homilies and speeches on it, but never at this level.

In the document, the pope makes a strong case that humans are at fault for the degradation of the environment. ‘Numerous scientific studies indicate that the major part of global warming in recent decades is due to the high concentration of greenhouse gas … emitted above all because of human activity,’ he writes. His thinking on the environment connects with other major themes of his papacy, including care for the poor and the importance of human life. In the document, he writes that the heaviest impacts of climate change ‘will probably fall in the coming decades on developing countries. Many poor people live in areas particularly affected by phenomena related to heating, and their livelihoods strongly depend on natural reserves and so-called ecosystem services, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.’ The effects on immigrants and refugees are also discussed: changing environmental conditions force them into a position of economic uncertainty in which livelihoods can’t be sustained, he says.

We should know that this encyclical is not a love letter to Greenpeace or any other environmental lobby group. Whilst Francis is embracing the idea of environmental stewardship, he’s doing so as a Catholic theologian, not a liberal activist. In America, the pope’s encyclical is being discussed in terms of U.S. politics, where a significant minority of most Republican voters and legislators deny the existence of climate change. Rick Santorum, a Catholic and former U.S. senator and presidential candidate, advised the pope to ‘leave science to the scientists and focus on what we’re good at, which is theology and morality.’

Francis links his call for environmental stewardship to the Book of Genesis, and he repeatedly couches environmental degradation in theological language. ‘That human beings destroy the biological diversity in God’s creation; that human beings compromise the integrity of the earth and contribute to climate change, stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; that human beings pollute the water, soil, air; all these are sins,’ he says.

American Catholics may be a sizeable group, but they form a small contingent on the whole of Francis’s church. There are 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world, and nearly 40 percent of them live in South America. Sub-Saharan Africa is another area of rapid growth for the Church; demographers expect the number of Christians in the region to double by 2050 to nearly 1.1 billion, although some of those will be Protestants. Considering that Latin America and Africa are Francis’s two biggest ‘constituencies,’ it’s no wonder that the environment is a point of pressing concern for the global Church. Climate change affects those who are poor and live in developing countries much more intensely than those who live in the developed world. In coming out against climate change, Francis is continuing the theme and focus of his entire papacy – speaking for the world’s poor.

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