In the meantime in UK... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/19/extreme-survei...

Snowden: "The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies."

"Like its predecessor, it's unclear that this amendment will make it through to law." - did it?

Edit: Don't need to remind you that other countries, too, have discussed or even introduced fairly ridiculous legislation (crypto wars, DMCA, ...)

The article is misleading. This legislation [1] only apply to terrorism acts. And basically every modern country that was targeted has similar laws [2].

[1] http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/14/amendements/3515/AN/90....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

That's a use case that was emphasized, but it doesn't appear that the government's actually aware of that limitation:

> M. Pierre Lellouche ... told the National Assembly. “They deliberately use the argument of public freedoms to make money knowing full well that the encryption used to[sic] drug traffickers, to serious [criminals] and especially to terrorists. It is unacceptable that the state loses any control over encryption..."

And whether or not it is supposed to "only apply to terrorism acts", there's no cryptographic algorithm that has a case for "secure unless the government is investigating an act of terrorism".

The point is that French law requires applications to be designed in such a way that key disclosure will allow customer data to be extracted. Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple iMessage, and other end-to-end apps would be illegal.

It's not crazy when you put it in context of the history of France with war and espionage I think. What are regulations on cryptography and decryption like in other European countries like Italy, Belgium, etc?