 France has seen a number of radicalised attacks in the past years. Our hearts have gone out to our French friends, especially during the Paris attacks in November 2015 and a Nissan Bastille Day of this year. Since November 2015, France has been under a state of emergency, and the French society has seen a number of drastic changes. France is now a police state, and with that came a very extensive and intrusive surveillance framework. And if we're looking at the upcoming French presidential election in the spring of 2017 and the rising popularity of the far right, we see that there is a serious need for debate on privacy rights, freedom of expression, and also on France's own national motto, which is the centre of the French democratic value system. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and what about privacy? So today we have with us Agnes and Chris from La Quadrature de Net. And they will start framing the debate with their questions. And we hope that you will have a chance to add to that after the talk. Please help me welcome Agnes and Chris. Hi everyone, thank you for coming. It's a great honour to be here. Let's start with something fun. Actually yesterday we kind of revamped the whole talk. Maybe this title should have changed to something like as we were talking so much about France, we should have called it like privacy baguette. So yeah, no further ado, let's start. So let's be honest. Things are quite bad in France for freedom. They are taking a bad direction and it's actually not easy to know exactly where the line between this is fine and it's really bad is. Living every day in France, it's difficult to say if you've already drifted too far. Or from what we know people are suffering and Libertés are under attack. But the very fact that we are here to talk about this is good news. We can still talk about democracy and challenge the power. So let's do it. So back in 2012, President Hollande has been elected. His programme was left-wing. But since the arrival of Manuel Valls as a Prime Minister in July 2014, it illustrated a security turn for the government. Since that, French government policies were strongly oriented towards more surveillance and more what they call security. Our goal is to inverse the trend to document what is going on so we can remember. In our political world where everything is buzzing when in the US election, we are even speaking about a post-truth war, where memories, documentation, they are of utmost importance. A little bit like the pigs in Orwell's animal form, more and more politicians are playing with memories and changing their minds every two years. Well, it is a new that people in position of power are trying to rewrite history. However, it's now more and more difficult to keep track of those changes, especially when on a long-term basis information is so quickly buried under a massive amount of other type of information. In this talk, we are focused on French laws that have been adopted in the last past three years and that are infringing fundamental rights in France in the digital area. Of course, liberty, égalité, fraternité, but also privacy, which is not in the national motto, but it's still a fundamental rights under mind. So there are too many laws that are lately causing our liberty to decrease at an alarming rate. Most of them have a strong impact on internet use, whether it's metadata gathering, surveillance or censorship. We can easily say that France is up to date to the most techniques of policing the internet. Instead of doing a review of each law specifically that was adopted in the last past three years, we would like to focus on the consequences of these laws. As France adopted very strong security measures even before 2015 and the terror attacks. So first of all, a problem on data retention and access. Law enforcement and administrative authority can have now a wider access to metadata returned by hosting providers and ISP for both purposes, such as the defense and the promotion of the fundamental interests of France. So here, before the adoption of the surveillance law in 2015, there were only a few administrations that had access to intelligence techniques. This is the surveillance law result and this slide which shows all the administration services that have access to intelligence techniques, which is lots of them. And this slide is not up to date because since it has been done, new administrations such as penitentiary authorities have also access to those types of techniques. Basically, those are the techniques that are allowed and that all those administrations have access to. So it's not very easy to read because it's a very, very big image. You can find it on our Wiki, I've created at the end of this presentation, you'll find the link. So basically, I've here the Minister of Defense with all the few administrations around. The Ministry of Interior around here and around there, the Minister of Finance. And now the Ministry of Justice with the penitentiary authorities have also access to that type of technique. So what technique are we talking about? Those techniques, well, they are what they were calling legal. So they are not illegal because there's no law to prohibit them, but they were used without any legal safeguards. They intrude privacy and although there is oversight urgency, having to check on how those techniques are being used and implemented, it has no real power to forbid the use of one of those techniques. Those tools gather analysis of encrypted communications, keyloggers, internet probes into the backbone of the network, IMC cultures and so on and so on. Well, there is also very weak and complicated judicial redress to protect citizens of that. As a matter of fact, all secret surveillance is difficult to prove and to attack them. It's public knowledge, although from several years, the French secret services were carrying surveillance on international submarine cables, illegal surveillance, with no public debates and no law. That's why it was illegal. Even though we had sufficient evidence that the system existed since 2008, the lawsuit brought to the Conseil d'Etat, the Supreme Administrative Court, was dismissed with no scrutiny. And of course now international communication are so intercepted, but now with the law. But still with no judicial redress and no real oversight. And here, for example, the MEP Sophie Inveld brought a court case before the Conseil d'Etat, the Supreme Administrative Court, and this court case was also dismissed. Basically, on the slides written that she asked and she tweeted, Marseille, France, I request control procedure for the National Commission for the control of intelligence technique, which the name in French is the C and CTR, the National Commission for the control technique, the renseignement that was tweeted on 4th May 2016. Next consequences will censorship. With the terrorism law of 2014, France reinforced the offense of Apology of Terrorism, which is the glorification of terrorism act and terrorism speech. This offense is even more sanctioned if committed online. Yeah, and here you have the United Nations report on the use of the Internet for terrorism purposes. And it's written that it's part specific on Apology of Terrorism, which says that some intergovernmental and human rights mechanism have expressed up that the concept of glorification of terrorism is sufficiently narrow and precise to serve as a basis for criminal sanctions compliant with the requirements of the principle of legality and the permissible limitations of the right to freedom of expression. So this is important because this means that France does not comply with that notion and consider that anything in the scope of Apology of Terrorism is illegal. And of course, with no definition, real definition of what is Apology of Terrorism. The problem is it's not only in France because the EU directive for combating terrorism, which is going to be adopted very soon at the EU level, it's going in the exact same way and then it will be applied in all the countries. So still without definition of what is Apology of Terrorism. We shall not forget that a key difficulty is to identify where the line of acceptability lies because it varies greatly from country to country depending on cultural and legal history. So Apology of Terrorism won't be exactly the same in one country and in another one. So and still no definition in none of the countries. Speaking of numbers, as we are geeks and we like numbers, between 1994 and 2014 there have been 14 people sentenced for with the offense of Apology of Terrorism. In 2015, so in one year, there has been 336 people sentenced with that offense considering that one-third of the people that have been sentenced have been sentenced on the sole offense of Apology of Terrorism. That means that people are getting sentenced for very serious sanctions for merely going on a website or posting a status on a social network. Now let's talk about police powers. So since November 2015 and the terrorist attacks in France, France is under a state of emergency, which is still ongoing. This state of emergency has been extended already five times and it will last until July 2017, so it will be almost two years and we don't know if it won't be extended again. It could be at least for the moment. It's the state of emergency is an exceptional state of power that was installed in France for the war in Algeria. It gives exceptional powers to the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense and as it was shaped as a regime for war situations. Now it looks like it's getting less of exceptional. But there is more. This means that we are going to have to elect our next president in France under an exceptional state of power. It means that emergency is becoming the current state of affairs. It's not a bug, it's a future. So next consequences, searches. This is part of the police powers, but it has very interesting things. So after the declaration of state of emergency in November 2015, the police carried a very large number of house searches at any time of the day and any time of the night. And also considering that those searches were done at the police discretion without any control in how the search was carried. Speaking of numbers, after three months, there has been around 3,336 searches. The searches were not only on the things in the place, but as well on the content of the computers or other type of system. There has been various versions of the law that allows those type of searches. The first law adopted in November allowed the police to grab any type of data on your computer and any type of system connected to the computer. That could be a remote system, considering it could be your cloud storage, your remote servers, or the whole internet. After that, the constitutional council, which is censored part of the law, and well put some kind of surfboards. But again, when the law was put back after the attack in Nice on Basti Day, the extent and the scope of gathering the data on the computer was again broadened. And that allowed to, for example, keep and retain any type of data that is considered suspicious, but wasn't linked to any type of offense. And that has been censured again by the constitutional council in the past month. Yeah, so next talk about the house arrests and limitations of demonstrations as well. So along with house searches, many people were under house arrest. This measure was largely used during the COP 21, which was the conference on climate change that was held in Paris in December 2015 to forbid the organization of demonstrations. So protesters were receiving notice that they were not allowed to be present in certain areas of Paris during a certain time, and some of them received three months or more house arrest. Basically, what a house arrest is, is that you have to be at your place during, well, at your home, almost all the day, because you have to go to the police station three times a day to say that you're here. So, for example, you have to go on 9 o'clock, 1 p.m., and 6 p.m. So you cannot really go to work, you cannot go anywhere. You have to stay in the same area. And on the top of that, there are a lot of people from the Muslim community that have been targeted by the police and that have seen the house brutally search along with a notice of four to three or more months without any proven or known offenses. On the sole fact that, well, they were Muslim and they might have been maybe in contact potentially with someone that has been in contact, that someone has been in contact, that someone has been in contact with something. Yeah. And on the top of all those measures that are barely legitimate, France requested the derogations from the European Court of Human Rights. It means that France deliberately asked the permission to infringe human rights. The Article 15 allows for a country to ask for that kind of permission in case of war or great danger for the nation. But what we saw is that we have seen during the COP 21 and the heavy repression of the protests against the labor bill in spring 2016. The state of emergency and the limitation and the derogations are not only used for anti-terrorism purposes and not only for great danger for the nations. French Fifth Republic is often called a presidential republic. This tendency is only confirmed by the adoption of the recent laws that were a real shift strengthening the executive power at the expense of the legislative and the judicial one. Sorry. Let's remember that the separation of powers is a key principle for democracy as none of the parts of the power are perfect and they all need to be balanced by each other. Which is written in the Declaration of Human and Civic Rights since 1789. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured nor the separation of powers defined has no constitution at all. So maybe we could say or ask whether France has a constitution at all. A constitution, yeah. That was a slide from the previous version of this presentation and that's the catalogue of all the laws we've been telling you about so far. It goes from 2013, we decided to start on 2013 because otherwise it would have been a six hour presentation. But from the military planning law to the terrorist law surveillance law you have might been heard about those law in the 32 C3 that have been a presentation on those laws. And after the extension of the state of emergency and the reform of the penal law that includes now in the common law measure from the state of emergency. And these laws are only those who are related in a way on another to the digital issues. So there are some others on immigration, on several things. On a fun thing, at some point we were wondering if they were all trying to put terrorism in a law so it could go further. For example, I remember a law that was called a law on transportation, public transport and terrorism. So they had someone we always trying to be like, hey, do you want a sandwich? Yeah, I would like ham, cheese and terrorism. So let's talk about privacy now. Privacy, are you kidding? Have you taught of terrorists? This is a great illustration. Yeah, so why privacy? Because it's increasingly something attacked in all those in France as something to limit or bypass in order to fight against terrorism. More especially to protect people from themselves or from the others, but normal people. So. Yeah, but as soon as you weaken fundamental rights, you have lost my line. As soon as you weaken fundamental rights, we weaken all order rights. The state of emergency regime is a perfect example of how the weakening of our rights and our liberties affect our societies. But privacy is a condition for us to exist and to think and to be ourselves. How to be free if you don't know whether you thought are scorned by public or private actors. The panopticon society is being installed in a very insidious way as self-censorship is going along with it. But there is more. In a society where panopticon is the norm, the only way to exert our liberties and to have some privacy is encryption. As you know, encryption is one of the key battle for the next years. And unfortunately, our politicians have won us through the issue and are trying to weaken our harm encryption. It's especially true in France, but probably not only. And so up to us to work for what we want and what we believe in. So now we explain the situation. Let's go to what we can do. So I really like this quotation that says that be the change you want to see in the world. Alcune, Alcune and La Quadrature tries to do this in very different way. First of all, there is one of the big work is advocacy. We did a lot of advocacy work on all those low mentals before. But as France since, well, the few months has started an electoral year. And as we know that politics are more communication than actual work, especially when an election is coming. It becomes almost impossible to follow and to explain the disaster to the member of parliament or to the government. They just reply, they have the responsibility to fight terrorism and so on and so on. And there is, of course, no other way to do this. When advocacy is not efficient anymore, we try to switch our strategy. And, for example, document the future for the future. So for example, this is in French, but this is one of the documents we write to try to explain how the whole system of security is going on. It's called Boulevard of the End of Liberties. We like very dramatic titles, are we are French? It goes from 2014 to 2016. Basically, it's everything you've seen until the Penal Law Reform. You can find it on our wiki. If you were interested to translate this, come talk to us. That could be a fun idea. Furthermore, after that, in May 2016, we really switched strategies. We decided to leave the state of emergency, explaining, for example, why we understood that the fact that politicians were going on for communication and maybe to be elected, it was very hard to try for them to listen to us. So, right now, what we're like, the truth is working, mostly working on positive proposal and to increase our work towards the general public in order to help understand the measure issues. Basically, we just took a tactical step back so we can go again more in the future. Please read the whole press release URL here. That's only for France. We keep working at the European level on the same thing. And, for example, also, but we don't disappear from the political landscape as we join order-like-minded NGOs to create a common platform to promote our proposals during the general election debate, but we don't really aiming them at any type of candidate. We're just saying that's the world we want. So, to hack our way around the limit of advocacy, for two years, we've been filing a court case against those laws. This is jointly made with two other NGOs. The two of them are the FFDN, FFDN. So, FFDN is a non-profit, the first one, is a non-profit ISP, the France Holdest Internet Access Provider, since 1992. And, FFDN is a federation of non-profit ISPs. So, gathering around 30 user-ported non-profit internet access providers, including FDN, and there is also one in Belgium, for example, so not only in France. So, the nickname of the group is the Exeggeta Mater. So, with a great translation in English. It's a group of volunteering lawyers and geeks in France, using the system to fight the system, and sometimes to lose against the system, and we try to win, also, sometimes. So, the Exegeta team is actually an informal and self-organized working group, so not a really NGO registered in France. They started the first lawsuits in early 2015, on data retention, and then on states on source ship and surveillance, and for two years, they've launched 20 procedures, which is huge, knowing that they're all volunteers, I mean, they all are working, they have normal work during the day, and they're working for the court case during the evening and the night that we can, and sometimes during their job time, probably, as well. But don't tell them to their employer. Yeah. I will give a quick overview of their job, but I will try to make it simple, because I'm not going to detail 20 procedures, which would be not possible, and if you're interested in it, and there will be a self-organization, but we will give the information at 4 p.m. today with some of the Exegets to talk about our litigation case, give more information, and also to coordinate litigation teams in Europe if some of you are involved in such groups, because this is quite important, and we've already tried to start it, but we feel that it would be great to go more into it. So, first, on data retention and access, the French military planning law that was adopted in day 7, 2013, extended the way for the administrative bodies to get access to metadata, written by hosting providers and ISP with a large and imprecise scope for the defense and promotion of national interests, which is so very broad. In fact, we started two court cases for this one. One more focused on data retention and data access in the framework of this specific military planning law, and one another on the whole existing framework for data retention. And one of our main arguments was that in 2014, the European Court of Justice had overturned the EU data retention provisions adopted in 2016, so 10 years ago, in a ruling called Digital Rights Island, so maybe some of you already heard about it. So, the first court case focused on military planning law was rejected by the court of states, by the Conseil d'Etat, the Supreme Administrative Court. We had asked for preliminary ruling to the Conseil d'Etat. The preliminary ruling is a question asked by a national judge to the European Court of Justice for interpreting... Well, we asked them to interpret the European laws, regulations, the European ruling, and it enables a better harmonized implementation of the regulation, the European regulation in all the member states. Unfortunately, the Conseil d'Etat, our court, did not even explain why they did not ask for the question, but they didn't ask for the question. And fortunately, the good news is that other national courts, such as the Swedish one and the British one, are making it better than French ones, have asked exactly the same question to the European Court of Justice on data retention. And the European Court of Justice replied last week on 21st of December, I think it was last week or the week before, that a general and indiscriminate data retention of all traffic and location data of all subscribers and registered users relating to all means of electronic communication was not compatible with the new chart of fundamental rights. So that was what we were saying and that was what the Conseil d'Etat said, you're wrong and we won't explain you why you're wrong, or we will explain you badly. So this ruling is a very good news for us. We were kicked out by the Conseil d'Etat and the European Court of Justice just said we were right. Now, we hope that the Conseil d'Etat will take it into account for our second court case, the one for the more general framework for data retention in France. So we are impatient to see what will come out from this decision as the stakes are very high. Next part. Yeah, next part on surveillance law. So it started a long time ago when probably some of you weren't born yet, in 1991. After a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, that France was violating privacy rights. The French government enacted... So already in 1991, France was doing things for infringing human rights. So it's probably not very new. But... So French government enacted a law on surveillance to enable public authority to use surveillance techniques and control radio communication without any oversight of any independent entity for the defense of national interests. You know, national interests are always the most important so we can do whatever we want and use whatever technique to control and to monitor radio communications. So we challenged these provisions before the constitutional... the Conseil constitutionnel, which is the constitutional court, and succeeded in October, striking down the legal regime for the surveillance of radio transmissions. So now they cannot do like before and make surveillance of radio transmission without any oversight, which was what they did before. Unfortunately, that's not all on surveillance. So we saw earlier that since the adoption of the surveillance law in July 2015, the tools for intelligent services and other public bodies having developed the scope broadened, the oversight not strong enough, but at the same time the judicial remedy has not been enhanced. And we have challenged all the implementing decrees, five of them, and we are still ongoing proceeding against the French government and the Conseil data. So it's still ongoing. We're still waiting for the... Decision. Because we sent information to the court and the government replied, and then we can reply and so on, until there is a decision. So it's still ongoing. And on censorship, which is the third big focus of the exegetes. So the terrorism law adopted in 2014 enables administrative body to block websites without prior judicial oversight, without prior judicial redress, and without proven efficiency. So real censorship. So France's legal regime is even worse than Russia's website working legislation. Because in Russia, the blacklist is actually subject to public scrutiny. In France, the list is updated in secret by the French police, and we cannot access it. Apparently the only country in Europe doing as bad as France is Turkey. So nice. Furthermore, when a page is censored, users that try to reach the page are automatically redirected to the Minister of Interior's web page, website, yeah. And when we challenged this, the Conseil data dismissed our argument, saying it was okay, because there was no processing of personal data such as IP addresses, for example. Yes, sure. Guess what happened? A few weeks ago, Orange, our historical telecom operator, made a big mistake and blocked IP addresses of Google, Wikipedia, and other websites. So big disorder for all those who are using Orange's DNS. And all the people were redirected to the Ministry of Interior's... That was a huge fail. The page... Well, the page fell down at the end, but they had a page at the beginning saying that they tried to reach a terrorist website. So Google... Google had become a terrorist website by a human mistake, which is quite interesting. And the Ministry has just announced that the data collected because of this mistake wouldn't be processed. But it had said before that none... of the data were processed. So what? It seemed that he changed his mind before the Orange failed and after the Orange failed. So no, we are getting back to the Conseil d'Etat with new evidence again. So that's it with the exegetes, and there will be more information and possibility to talk with them and with us. It will be at the error lounge. It's on the fourth floor in front of all one. So it's like the place with huge glasses and it's like very beautiful. I think this is where you have the mannequins. Maybe. It's at 4pm. At 4pm today. Just fourth floor. To talk with the exegetes. So there is, aside those all legal challenges and legal work we're doing, which is in fact very, very interesting because sometimes when you have a huge website blocked, you have new information. One of the other means of literature is to work with people and to help them to understand and reappropriate themselves, the issues and our fight. The idea is so people can not only be part of fight but to make their fight their own. So we can decentralize. We are not the provider of how it should be. We have, as you know, every CCC will talk about our tools and we have a lot of ongoing working tools and most of them are working and most of them are really awesome. So Memopole, which is a tool that allows to track the position of a representative over the time on a subject. So basically, so you will be able to know if you're representative, what he voted before and after this and that and that and if he changes his mind a lot or not. For example, we on our instance of Memopole because Memopole can be decentralized and you can install your own instance, which is great. We have people that voted for ACTA back in the days and they voted for the surveillance law in France when they come back from the European administration to the French administration. So they have such a bad score, it's almost impossible. How is that possible? Well, this is a tool that is on free and live open source software. It's on our Git, so please check it up if you're a developer, if you like doing data work and so on. It's really, really interesting. The next tool that we are using is the Python. We use it to contact freely or representative. The idea is that people when they're on an ongoing European campaign, for example, for the European Parliament, how they're going to be able to contact the representatives because, well, you know, phone charges and when you have to do international phone it's even more. Everyone should be able to participate into the public debate. That means that you shouldn't be worried about how much it costs you. So we build a tool that allows you to pay it freely, to contact your representative freely. It's really free as in free beer and free as in freedom, as you know. There is also on the GitLab please take a look on this. It's fun. The other one, that's a documentation. We were talking a lot about documentation before and our Wiki is used to document all our work, all our analysis and it was very, very heavily used to prepare this conference because trying to find back into months and months of press release is more complicated and you have a Wiki with all the information that really was structured, it's important. Also, to note that during the first week of the state of emergency that there is not on the slide because I just talked about this but people started to make a list of all the violation of rights during the house searches and during the house arrest. And our Wiki page, when you go on the first page you can find it very quickly there is a list of all press articles speaking about violation during the first weeks and first month of the state of emergency. This list is huge. Just for that. Wiki are important people. Then you have Respect My Net I don't know if some people were on the talk in a whole day one were speaking about net neutrality and basically Respect My Net that also has a website at respectmynet.eu It's a tool that allows to spot the violation of net neutrality. I'll really go back to that conference and if you have questions come talk to me. And there are other things that are more part of the new strategy of liquidature. Crypto parties and the network of supporters. While crypto parties you've been to some of them, you know what it is and it's still really important and it's still relevant. Maybe the way we were doing them is good. Maybe we have to change our way of doing them nonetheless. Sharing our experiences, sharing our knowledge, sharing our best practices, sharing our error is making us a better community is making me better tools. So we have to keep doing them. We are working with people trying to go back in new ideas on doing crypto parties and some more than just the usual crypto party thing that are already signing PGP there are more to that. There have been a lot of talk about encryption and security here at the CCC and the previous CCC as well and I'm sure in the future one. So really people talk to each other. And finally the network of supporters which is the core thing of what we can do. The network of supporters like any type of NGO is the people that are making the network of supporters will be nothing. We will just be people in the office working something. But when people speak about it when people contact with it we have the ability to decentralize our work and decentralize our communication. That makes us more resilient because if something falls there the rest can work. So that's everything. So that's it. We know we can do it and we know we are already doing it so let's keep doing this. Let's go back to our conclusion. I'm not here to really tell you what to do we are just presenting what you are doing here in France. But what's going on in your countries? You're all from different countries from the European Union even overseas so what laws are going on in your country? What type of legislation is regulating surveillance? And what are you doing about that? What about doing other litigation work? Let's join a huge European litigation work and let's hack again the system because advocacy work maybe will have to think about new ways to make our rights and to speak about the rights in the next years. So think of yourself. What are you doing? What are you doing? Let's get together. Let's decentralize things. Let's make other types of litigation work other types of crypto parties other types of tools that allow us to communicate, allow us to make our rights important and to connect and to participate in the public debate because well democracy is alive because of the people. If the people are not alive there is no democracy. So that's it. You have the credit for that. I think everything I have put in the slides. There is access to not metadata techniques. So you have this on the Wiki. The report on the use of internet for purposes, the icon. There is twice the same file. That's great. A big shout out to StromGate who made the file with the whole world. Thank you very much to that. You have the data vis on the friend security load on by our graphic designer and the privacy comic on that page. There are a lot of comics about privacy. Some of them are really, really funny. Go over there. Finally, if you have questions, contact us. Website. We are on an ongoing fundraising and thank you. If you have questions, we are on to that. If you have questions for Agnes and Chris, there are four microphones on the sides. Please come to the microphone. We don't have so much time. So let's start right away with the microphone on this side, please. I have a general question about the French situation. As far as terrorism is concerned, is there any debate whatsoever in France that France may have something to do with French colonialism in the past centuries? No. No, it is on colonialism. Well, I remember in the November 2020 last year, in November, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said something very strong and that's really illustrated how French power were seeing terrorism at least at that time. It was explaining it's already trying to forgive. Yes, that's a word. So explaining is trying to forgive. What does that mean about the understanding of such a complicated issue as what Europe is going through right now? So I guess the debate will happen in the next years. There are people working at the NTRS in France. Big shout out to them. But so far in the big parliament and so on, this debate is not really heard as French politicians are really much on historical reaction to terrorism. It's like, this is crazy. We have to do something. Our values, our life model, lifestyle, everything is attacked. So far, the debates were not really one-sided. Okay, then here in the front, please. Yeah. I have a question regarding the house rates we were talking about that were rising, especially within the Muslim community. I think in Germany, too, there are lots of people who are referred as suspects, although there is no reason and there are surveyors also. And I wanted to know if there is anything on a policy level or maybe from the civil society initiatives or organizations working against that. Not so far. The thing is that there have been a few court files and court cases on the house rates. What is interesting is that they really rushed everything after the attacks of November. And so things are getting settled and first things are getting judged. And for example, there are people that are still under house arrest since November last week, last year. So this is like, we don't know. I guess in the future something will come up. But so far there are civil society working on that. Amnesty and the League de Dredelum Human Rights No, not Human Rights but the Human Rights League are working on that. Thank you. Then we have a question from the Internet. Yes. The IRC is asking basically two questions. First of all, Echo 21 asks you mentioned over 3,000 searches since the state of emergency was enacted. Do you know how many convictions for crimes these have resulted in? Yes, but I forgot to put the numbers. Let me try to find it. You have my great wallpaper here. I hope this was here. Great. I know I found the numbers. Those numbers are from the report on the first month. It's not since last year. That's the first month of state of emergency. That the report was issued on the third month. What is this? Yeah. So there was the French newspaper. Le Monde has a section called the Decoders. They're trying to do data based on numbers but it's very small. But you have 400 that was after three months. That was on the report. 400 house arrest. There are 290 still active. There has been 563 judicial procedure with 28 on terrorism. 23 for apology of terrorism. 28 being linked to terrorism. And five real for terrorism. So that's very small. And there have been the next numbers I'm just reading that for the information that this 1038 individual that have been followed by different secret services, the DGEC which is the interior services and among which 320 have been already contacted. So yeah. This has been done in January 2016 so it was a year ago, three months after the start of state of emergency. Those numbers are outdated. We have no idea about the new one. Thank you for that. And the second question is by Iqtrasil. He basically asks in your eyes how big is the impact of the exegy amateur on the situation in France? Is it more than a voice to articulate disagreement with the status quo? I think it's from internet. Otherwise I would have tell them to go ask them. Nonetheless, I think we are creating a lot of jurisprudence that could be used from other countries in Europe or in the world or in France for that kind of issue. Yeah, I think the influence the impact of the exegetes is increasing time after time. And now people are contacting us on Twitter to ask us to challenge a new law or anything that are coming and that is not great. I think that there is something that is growing. The exegetes have been ongoing for two years only, so that's very, very young. Okay, then the microphone in the back there, please. Hi. Could you talk a little bit more about the role litigation has had in activism and creating political change, especially if you have any examples about your experience with it? The impact of litigation in activism I think it's very important just because right now we feel that advocacy in France at least advocacy is not enough to change things. So you fight as you can against, for example for surveillance law in 2015 we fought a lot. We were, Lacroix Latour was at the top of was leader in the fighting against this law and finally we lost because it was adopted and Even though on that we create a huge coalition of warrior we create a huge coalition with private actors, private companies startups also with NGO for Human Rights and other type of right general civil rights. The coalition was huge also individuals, I mean there have been lawyers, very known and top lawyers to try signing against that and the government was deaf to that, so maybe if it's not working let's hack away on that. Yeah, and then it's important to us to have other solutions afterwards to fight against and it enables other people to participate because some of the people would not be able would not like to do some advocacy but can help to do some litigation it enables also to collaborate, to cooperate with other NGOs doing the same thing on litigation in other countries and to create new new links and new networks so I think it's complementary and it's very important to keep going with it because and it's also when you cannot find a way to for example for data retention there was no way for us to win to make it fall down on the French level either by advocacy or by French challenges or court cases and it's at the European Union level that we can finally succeed so it's very important to try everything. Yeah, to try all the tools we have to succeed to it and then we can do something about it. Okay, thank you. Then up here in the front, please. In my opinion calling the State of Emergency is a slight overreaction on the topic but what is the public opinion in France on this? How are the people viewing that the public opinion is not a name of us that's the name of the actual state it's called that your chance it's from the low from the 1955 on the public opinion it has been changing a lot I think considering public opinion it's really complicated as public opinion it depends where you pick it do you pick it from your friends do you pick it from a study that I see a relation with the general reaction and I think you can link it with the stock strategy defining Naomi's claim book so after the attacks of course everyone was trying we want more security but we can see that even as France adopted an anti-turn law every year for the past 20 years 25 years we have still those problems and there is something that politicians try to advocate and fix things however we know as we are geeks hackers and so on that perfect security is impossible so on the public opinion I think there is we are living a turmoil on one side you have the rise of populist leaders such as Marine Le Pen on the other side you have left-wing parties going full security and the politic applied by Manuel Vales wasn't a left-wing politics such of strong right-wing politics that could have been done by any kind of hardcore republican so I think we are on the time of a change and we have to decide what do we believe in what world do we want and what do we want to do that role and I would just add something which is even if people get used to the state of emergency get used to be searched the bags each time you go in a shop get used to you know have to show your bags to take the train or anything like this and to have less freedoms on the internet or less freedoms anyhow I mean they are getting used to be in a more what to lose their freedom you know and and this is absolutely not what we want so we try to oppose this that's it thank you then the internet again please we had a huge feedback on twitter and of course many people are asking is this a blueprint for other countries as well but Puri Kion in IRC is especially asking what is the current state of affairs in Belgium do you know something about that I know Belgium has adopted few security laws for having been in I have not such in depth knowledge about Belgium legislation on that nonetheless I think Belgium is less drama queen about that they have been in Belgium just after the attacks in Brussels and the reaction between Paris and Brussels was very very different Belgium has other type of issue for example also that has far right wing political party so that's another type of problem so I would say go ask NURPA which is the natural right protection organization in Belgium so maybe go ask them they may know more than me thanks and then over here please I may refer back to Belgium because I live in Brussels so in this situation I think it's good because the government is already chaotic enough so they cannot really take stance on this and the only comment they made so far was blaming playstation for encryption and communication among terrorists that was the minister of interior but coming back to France do you have any allies among public figures or any political parties maybe not parties but politicians who voice your concerns and your calls what's the state of the public debate and do you foresee that after the elections in case for national wins can it go any worse I'm not asking that question I will not answer that question I can't get any more but we have politicians that are supporting us a little bit or a lot but few of them especially the member of parliament well right now we have a socialist government the government is socialist one but it's an extreme right one as well so depending the official name or the right situation so among the socialist among the left wing we have support in the green side or depending on we have a little bit but among the member of parliament it's very few of them and especially on terrorism issue each time they have to vote something that they will be responsible if they do not vote the law so they do not want the next attack so I mean the support is not so strong and the government is using a very that's very part of the new prime minister of France, Bernard Kaiznev that has a very way of saying telling people that they should vote what he is giving that if you don't vote first you are against France you are against French values and you will be responsible for the next attack as a politician what does that mean well you have your job your job is chosen by the people and after you are scared that people are going to tell you that's your fault so you kind of vote the same way he says okay we have time for one more brief question that goes to you so the EU seems to be helping you guys a bit I mean you are saying you go over the French courts and to the EU courts and it's nice that the EU has at least something a force for good but how long will that last I mean there are a lot of other countries that are pushing the EU in a well fascist direction to put it that way I mean how long will this be helpful it depends for example we talked about the EU court of justice that helps us for data retention for example and it's not always the case for example the directive on combating terrorism that is currently negotiated at the EU level and will be adopted by the EU parliament in January or beginning of February probably is not very good and lots of French measures for terrorism law are put into this directive so the EU is not always helping us but it's interesting for us to work with the EU because you go out from your French very close you know mind from the government and members of parliament so right now this is not always the EU that helps us but not all the part of the EU but especially the court and honestly we do not know how long it would last and we hope it could help us to keep going this way but you know otherwise if further people here will have questions come see us at the tea house afterwards and for the talk at 4pm what time is that again? 4pm 4pm 4th floor that's easy thank you everyone