France Outraged over NSA spying. How do you say "Glass Houses" in French?

The hypocrisy of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius' outrage over U.S. spying allegations is stunning. France's record on espionage is well-known and long-standing. Here are just a few examples:

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Votre Secrets, Monsieur?
"AS THE 20TH CENTURY DRAWS TO A CLOSE, a country's economic power has become more essential to its survival than its military prowess. This increased emphasis on market dominance means the world's intelligence services are refocusing their efforts from collecting the traditional political and military material to collecting economic, scientific, technological, and business information. One intelligence service that has become synonymous with this new effort is the French government's General Directorate of External Security (DGSE)."

"The idea of the French using their intelligence service to obtain scientific, economic, and technological information from friendly countries is not new. Returning to power in 1958, President Charles de Gaulle indicated that the Service for External Documentation and Counterespionage (SDECE), the then French intelligence agency, needed to focus on obtaining technological information about the United States and other Western countries."

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WIKILEAKS: France leads Russia, China in Industrial Spying in Europe
"Back in 2001, European leaders accused the United States government of operating a vast industrial espionage network that was eavesdropping on European businesses and giving trade secrets to American companies. According to the latest WikiLeaks cable release, they should have been looking internally."

"France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage on other European countries, even ahead of China and Russia, according to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, reported in a translation by Agence France Presse of Norwegian daily Aftenposten's reporting."

"French espionage is so widespread that the damages (it causes) the German economy are larger as a whole than those caused by China or Russia," an undated note from the U.S. embassy in Berlin said."

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Next Up for France: Police Keyloggers and Web Censorship
"Having just passed its super-controversial Internet "graduated response" law, you might think the French government would take at least a brief break from riling up the "internautes." Instead, the government is prepping a new crime bill that will, among other things, mandate Internet censorship at the ISP level, legalize government spyware, and create a massive meta-database of citizen information called "Pericles."

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And this is just from the ones that I collected while researching and writing my security guide for business travelers ebook. The public might be outraged, but government officials know better.

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Note to U.S. Officials - Stop Whining over IP theft

Here's some un-solicited advice to pretty much everyone inside the Beltway. Please stop whining about China's hacking activities while rationalizing our own. No one else in the world has committed the scope or scale of cyber espionage that the NSA apparently has done against so many foreign states. No one else in the world has sabotaged another nation's uranium fuel enrichment facility. PRISM (and TIA before it) betrayed the same rights to privacy that China and Russia have done to their populations using similar technology and for the exact same reasons (to protect themselves from terrorists and threats to their respective governments).

For you to say that all of the above is OK for us to do but at least we don't steal other companies' intellectual property is utterly ridiculous and makes a distinction without a difference. While the U.S. government may not be interested in stealing a Russian company's IP, that's probably because we don't have any state-owned businesses. After all, U.S. companies certainly steal from others and have for many years. If those same CEOs ran businesses owned by the U.S. government (like EDF in France), I guarantee you that the U.S. government would be as eager to engage in "technology transfer" as China is or like the French government is, etc.

Moralist pronouncements from nation states almost always come across as hypocritical, heavy-handed, and pompous because the business of running a country and protecting its people and its assets is not a moral mission; it's a pragmatic mission. The federal government does what's necessary to keep the U.S. in a superior position in the world - as it should. Instead of whining about China's or any other nation's acts of cyber espionage, just suck it up and focus on incentivizing private companies to create an information security framework that actually works. 

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France Throws Cyber Stones From Its Glass House

Source: L'Expansion.L'Express.fr 20 NOV 2012

The government of France shouldn't be so quick to charge the U.S. with being responsible for the Flame malware found on President Sarkozy's computer. Kaspersky Lab had remarkably little evidence to support their charge that it was created by the team that created Stuxnet and Duqu, and CrySys Labs said that it probably wasn't created by the Stuxnet/DuQu team.

Further, France is in no position to throw stones. It's use of cyber espionage operations is well-known inside the U.S. Intelligence Community as well as by the German gov't who consider them a more severe risk to intellectual property theft than Russia or China. France's state-owned energy firm EDF also conducted cyber espionage attacks against Greenpeace.

Related:

Report: French officials accuse US of hacking Sarkozy's computers
Votre Secrets, Monsieur? "The idea of the French using their intelligence service to obtain scientific, economic, and technological information from friendly countries is not new."

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28 Nation States With Cyber Warfare Capabilities

The 2nd edition of Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping The Cyber Underworld will contain 4 new chapters plus a new Forward by former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and an Afterward by Professor Catherine Lotrionte of Georgetown University. One of those chapters is entitled "Cyber Warfare Capabilities By Nation State". For those of you who can't wait for the 2nd edition to come out, here are the 27 28* States:

1. Australia
2. Brazil
3. Canada
4. Czech Republic
5. Democratic People's Republic of Korea
6. Estonia
7. France
8. Germany
9. India
10. Iran
11. Israel
12. Italy
13. Kenya
14. Myanmar
15. Netherlands
16. Nigeria
17. Pakistan
18. Peoples Republic of China
19. Poland
20. Republic of China (Taiwan)
21. Republic of Korea
22. Russian Federation
23. Singapore
24. South Africa
25. Sweden
26. Turkey
27. United Kingdom
28. United States*

This is not a complete list, but it's a start. We may roll it over into an up-datable website and add the states that we missed for the book (e.g., all of the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, additional states from Africa and South America, etc.)

* UPDATE: (29 Sep 2011) I left the U.S. off the original list because it's covered under one of the other new chapters! Sorry, everyone. :-D

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