This is pretty widely known. Especially in the Defense industry and their world class industrial espionage skill goes all the way back to the eighteenth century.
It's not "citation needed", you're just ignorant of history.
Lol for you to truly believe this. German officials were still complaining about French spying in the wikileaks cables.
France has partically cornered the market on datacenter infrastructure (everything from the racks down...somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 is made by French companies).
If you think 300+ years of strategy/tradecraft suddenly ceased functioning 40 years ago (and because why?) you'd be sorely mistaken.
It's more likely the case that manned airframe deveopment has been fairly stagnant around the world since the 80s for political/budget reasions (which is true), so you haven't been able to see their blatant wins. France has seemed to keep up with the rest of world in UAV development (Parrot) despite much less investment....
Are you suggesting that Parrot has been benefiting from industrial espionage? That's absolutely ridiculous.
First, everyone is way behind DJI, that's just a fact. You can buy a DJI drone, open it, inspect it, and still not be able to do a perfect alternative at the same price.
Second, some UAV autopilots were written by a couple engineers more than a decade ago, and today there are pretty advanced open source autopilots, with open source protocols and open source apps to control them.
I don't know about your other claims, but given the UAV one, I must now doubt them.
That's not a sound argument, neither a sourced one.
Let's take your example, Parrot, it's not because a company can do as good with less than it means it is stolen technology.
Has the world over stolen the screw tech in the US technology tree because I can buy it at the hardware store for a cent when one is billed $40 to the US army?
I love how people take a throwaway line that's practically an afterthought and discard the bits about their 300+ years of experience doing exactly this.
Those bits are well documented and you can go read about them with a cursory google search.
But no, my reasoning is WiLd AnD cRaZy.
I would say that given France's history, you would have to show me that Parrot _hasn't_ benefited from some level of industrial espionage.
The other funny thing is that France being a leading industrial espionage power was also part of the Snowden leaks, which means the NSA believes that this is true, as recently as a decade ago.
It was almost an open secret that French Intelligence bugged and monitored first class (and elsewhere) of the TransAtlantic Concorde flights between Europe and the US (and elsewhere).
This was, for many years, the prestige fastest travel between the major powers and a honeypot of loose lips by diplomats, politicians, and even senor military staff from many nations.
There is a lot of "could", "might", "reportedly", and "plausible" in this article. I.e. suppositions and assumptions. Nothing backed up.
Now, it's a standard practice in security to not discuss security issues and confidential info in a public space like a plane. I'd not be surprised the French goverment would bug the Concorde, but it does not imply at all the supposed extent, ruthlessness and far-reach that the OG poster implies.
> but it does not imply at all the supposed extent, ruthlessness and far-reach thar the OG poster implies.
Well perhaps a better understanding of Cold War politics might peel back the cover on how ruthless the French can be.
It's a fact that the bulk of the Cold War weapons grade ore was sourced from parts of Africa that were former | current French | Belgian colonies and satelite states, it's well recorded the ongoing destabilisation of local democratic Governments that kept effective control of mineral operations in the hands of principally French companies acting as US proxies in an extensive (at the time) unreported war of resource domination and control.
What the French did in New Zealand, planting bombs and killing civilian anti nuclear demonstrators [1] pales in comparison to their actions in Africa and elsewhere.
> The sinking of Rainbow Warrior, codenamed Opération Satanique, was a state-sponsored terrorist bombing by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE), carried out on 10 July 1985.
The argument is about industrial espionnage and French ruthlessness in doing it.
There are clear evidence that French neocolonialism has had terrible impacts on Sub-Saharan Africa for instance and beyond (The Ivory Coast crisis is a more recent example than the ones you chose). However, they barely indicate anything about an ability to conduct industrial espionnage in, say, the USA. At best, it is adjacent.
Bombing the Rainbow Warrior says nothing about the French government's industrial spying capacity as well. It shows how shody the DGSE was in fact.
It clearly demonstrates a ruthlessness in the French Intelligence services through the delibrate bombing of a foreign flagged ship in New ZEaland Government Territory and, by extension, the ruthlessness of the French Government via their arm, those same services.
> It clearly demonstrates a ruthlessness in the French Intelligence services through the delibrate bombing of a foreign flagged ship
They bombed the ship in a harbor, in a way that was intended to let everyone evacuate the ship. The photographer died because he came back to the hull to get his belongings when the second bomb exploded. (Which isn't to say it was an accident. The agents did plant those bombs, and the bombs did kill someone in a way they could have anticipated, even if it wasn't their goal.)
It's a radical action to take for an intelligence service, and it's a deadly crime committed on the sovereign territory of an allied country, but I don't think it's fair to assess that it demonstrates "ruthlessness of the French Government". It's certainly pretty mild by the standards of international espionage.
And it seems like very weak evidence if used to argue that France has uniquely aggressive secret services. I don't want to do whataboutism to excuse the DGSE's actions, but if the argument is that the DGSE is less bound by ethics than, say, the CIA, then I do have to point out that the CIA has done a lot worse than bombing a boat, a lot more recently.
Spy agencies and police bug all sorts of stuff. The hallways of Federal courts are widely believed to be bugged. I’m sure lots of different entities spy on airport lounges, etc.
Where do they rank in terms of being an industrial power? If they’re spying and that’s the best outcome they can muster…I don’t blame people for assuming they’re not peak-spying.
They're the 8th largest manufacturing country in the world. Is that industrial superpower territory? I don't think so. Italy out-manufacturers them by about 10%.
I'd say so. as I alluded to in my comment, in aerospace and defense they're very much among the top three. A country that competes if not leads India and China despite having twenty times smaller a population I think deserves that label. And rather than use Italy to drag France down in a comparison I'd say it's a good opportunity for people to recognize that Italy itself is quite underrated. The country has a remarkably resiliant private sector in particular.
I have. (Note that the first two you listed are not two different things, or to the extent they are, the second one is US, continuing to be based just down the road in MA, USA).
I have not heard of the U.S. as a contender for industrial espionage. Traditional espionage sure, but not for competitive advantage. Do know of any sources for info about that?
> The U.S. National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will grab any intelligence it can get its hands on regardless of its value to national security, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told a German TV network.
> In text released ahead of a lengthy interview to be broadcast on Sunday, ARD TV quoted Snowden saying the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security and he cited German engineering firm, Siemens as one target.
> "If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to U.S. national interests - even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security - then they'll take that information nevertheless," Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia where he has claimed asylum.
Which, like... of course.
Politics follow incentives. If you build an espionage apparatus that lets you spy on conversations worldwide, and you have laws that lets you read private data without a warrant and send a gag order to the company that owns the server, and you have laws specifically for doing the above to data stored in europe by american companies, and your only mechanisms for accountability are to the White House, not the public or foreign countries, and you can get your boss re-eletected by helping american companies create jobs at the expense of foreign companies... Why would you ever abstain from industrial espionage?
Well, they abstain because it is wrong, immoral, and illegal. As this article [1] notes, even leaked material from the DNI which contemplates industrial espionage does not contain any evidence of it.
The US IC being a horrible monster may well fit your world view. But we must not allow ourselves to confuse what we think should be easy to prove with what we actually can prove. And I don’t even mean “prove” in some strict, legal sense. I just mean prove in the sense of providing evidence with the same ease that you provide speculation. If you could point to cases of US industrial espionage in Snowden’s leaks, that would be a good start.
The US controls the global economy, every transactions made in $ are sniffed and tracked, they know about your trade secrets
And if you dare escape from their watchdog, they'll let you know illico presto [1]
(this is also why i believe that cryptocurrencies fad is a FED project, and Satoshi is one of their codename)
One of my biggest regret is not saving the article i read on that matter that went into the details on why, including how they leverage their army of lawyers to make sure you comply, or it was a book, it's sad that i forgot.., read a little bit about Alstom, it's very shady
It's also part of the reason why they are scared about BRICs moving away from the dollar and adopting the YUAN and its digital version
Hmm, I still don’t see any industrial espionage - governments spying on other countries’ businesses in order to give secret IP to their own industrial leaders. This is distinct from gathering intel on business to inform national security decisions.
Your comment seems like a general distrust of the US intel collection based on a mist of evidence and conspiracy theory.
Citation needed.
(Especially given that the other two contenders are the US and China)