France foils attack plot, plans constitutional reforms

[MowCowWhoHow III]

Source: AFP

Paris (AFP) - A jihadist plot was foiled last week in the French region of Orleans, southwest of Paris, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Tuesday, as the government prepared constitutional changes to enshrine emergency police powers.

"A planned attack targeting representatives of state forces in the Orleans region was foiled last week by the DGSI (France's internal intelligence agency)," Cazeneuve said.

Two French citizens aged 20 and 24 were arrested on December 19, he said. The older has a police record for petty crime.

A police source told AFP that one was originally from Morocco and the other from Togo.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/france-arrests-two-over-foiled-attack-plot-near-164859398.html

[JonLeibowitz]

1. Um, this is bad news. France is responding to terror by restricting citizens' freedoms.

Hopefully the US does better, but I am not optimistic about our leaders' resolve to protecting civil liberties.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. If we have anything close to what happened in Paris or another 9-11 scale attack

there will be an authoritarian reaction here that will put us clearly in the police state category.

I'll let pass the observation that we are already in an effective police state now with our militarized police forces and our unfettered surveillance of everyone everywhere. I don't disagree with that, what will happen will be more overt, more iron-gloved, much more recognizably fascist.

[JonLeibowitz]

3. +1 Fully Agree.

[DFW]

4. But France already has a head start

They already listen in on and watch pretty much everybody. They don't catch everything, but they come down like a ton of bricks on even the smallest shop owner if they think they can fine him for 50 euros of some made-up violation of some obscure accounting law, just so they can take in money, which they look to squeeze from any rock as yet unturned. The paperwork you need just to live in that country is unbelievable, and the legislature passes contradicting laws just to say they are doing something. The newest proposal is to come down on people who have bought houses. Once their mortgage is paid off, they now want to tax the home owners on the theoretical rent they are saving by owning the home instead of renting it--and they know who and where everyone is. There are few states in Europe more powerful than the French one.

Already, at the North train station in Paris (Gare du Nord), there are passport checks (not seen since Schengen) before boarding trains to Belgium, Holland and Germany, and now, since Sunday, you have to go through an airport-like security check, too. I just went through this yesterday. It sure doesn't protect against a terrorist attack, as it just bunches up a couple of hundred people into a tight group waiting to get to the train and makes a massacre that much easier. The security people are under pressure, too, as they don't have the time or the space they do at an airport. You can't take off your coat outside in winter. Pickpockets are everywhere at the station, too, and the cops don't have the time anyway to look out for them. We weren't even asked to take off our coats. Everyone went through the metal detector. Everyone beeped. The overwhelmed security guys said, just open your coats, and did a 5 second feel up on each of our coats to make sure you didn't have a bazooka, or some such WMD, and pushed us all through so the train could leave on time.

So they'll foil most plots. They won't foil all of them. The one advantage France DOES have is that they have so many immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries that they can find personnel to do some serious listening in on phone conversations of potential bad guys.