14 DAY TRIAL // French authorities are considering a new law that would ban Tor and restrict access to public WiFi networks across the country, as a result of the ISIS attacks in Paris on November 13.
While France had been one of the most liberal countries when it came to TOR adoption, with many nodes being available at numerous locations in French companies and universities, recent news coming out of Paris shows that this haven for user privacy and Internet freedom is about to meet its doom.
Scared by the anonymity Tor provides to its users, France regulators are considering banning the software inside the country's borders.
Without a way to tap into the Tor network and siphon traffic so that they could keep an eye on the country's entire Internet traffic, the French government is now considering new laws that would make anything they can't control illegal, as Le Monde reports.
While the Tor issue makes sense, since France won't be the first country that has a bone to pick with the famous anonymity toolkit, public WiFi connections are also about to take a hit.
Public WiFi will be shut down in case of a national emergency
According to the government's new law, whenever the state declares a state of emergency, all operators of public WiFi networks will be forced to shut down their systems.
With a copy of the ISIS OpSec manual available in the wild, banning Tor and temporarily restricting public WiFi networks don't do anything to put a dent in the Islamic State's communication capabilities.
France will have to ban a whole lot more technologies to cripple down ISIS inter-squad communications, and in spite of the government's best efforts, France's citizens will be the ones that suffer from these limitations most of the time.
The law is currently only a proposal, but Le Monde says it will be submitted for vote to the French Parliament next year.
Oh, and remember this?