When tragedy strikes in France, like it did with the recent Paris terrorist attacks, Police have to try to track suspects down, although there is one obstacle that has stood in its way; public Wi-Fi.
It may seem like an odd thing to blame, but according to France’s gendarmes, suspects utilizing public Wi-Fi hotspots are harder to trace than those using at home Internet connections.
According to a document seen by French newspaper Le Monde, French officials are working on a law which would “forbid free and shared Wi-Fi connections” during a state of emergency.
French Police want to go further than just banning public Wi-Fi however, with the government also keen to gain backdoor access to encrypted services such as Skype or Gmail.
This is similar to legislation drafted by U.S. legislatures, which proposed giving the FBI access to encrypted services in the name of national security. Unlike in the U.S., France doesn’t appear to be willing to back down, as the bill could go up for a vote as soon as January 2016.
It’s not immediately clear how the French government plans to police the banning of public Wi-Fi in times of national crisis—after all, the city of Paris alone provides over 300 free Wi-Fi hotspots, not including the thousands of businesses doing the same across the country.
Alongside the banning of public Wi-Fi and backdoor access to encrypted services, France’s legislatures also want to ban Tor—a secure web network that is preferred by privacy conscious web-users.
Tor works by obscuring a user’s original IP address by sending communications through multiple volunteer-operated servers. It has become somewhat of a playground for criminals who don’t wish to have their web history traced back to them.
France’s desire to ban the network may not be entirely realistic however, as there are hundreds of privately operated servers around the world which make up the Tor network.
China has the only government in the world that has successfully blocked Tor and that’s only because of the nation’s vast firewall—which has garnered critical reaction from around the world due to censorship.
The Chinese government outright blocks connections to publicly listed Tor entry nodes and automatically finds and blocks any unknown entry nodes.
How the population of France will react to the outright banning of the service is another factor in this move by the French government. The first word in the country’s motto is “liberté,” so they may not take kindly to the change.
