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Today, I tried to make an easy joke about the French. It backfired. No one in the addressed group knew that France made cryptography illegal in recent history. They were rather incredulous that I could make such an absurd
exclamation. I was stymied by the strength of their remarks. So I investigated the issue further and this is what I found.
France has issues with encryption. I am not saying they are worse than any other country. I’m just saying that they have issues. A lot of it stems from lousy decision in the late nineties, but it may just be a lack of understanding with core technical issues. They may argue that the rest of the world does not consider their unique perspective. Regardless, we can say that France is notorious for making technical decisions based upon non-relevant technical reasons to the detriment.
The history of their efforts is best exemplified by the ATM protocol debacle (1). Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was supposed to be the pre-imminent global networking protocol with fast speeds and wide spread adoption. However, France wanted the protocol to support a short data format that would allow unhindered data transmission from one side of France to the other. This violated the interests of pretty much everyone outside of France. The short data format would fragment VOIP, multimedia, and other streaming technologies. Consequently, a compromise was made which resulted in an obtuse specification. Now, ATM is rarely used. When it is used, TCP runs over top of it with fragmented packets and extra bytes to support the odd ATM size are transmitted unnecessarily. All of this trouble is caused because of a bad decision based on a non-technical point. Encryption is the same sad story on two separate occasions.
The first occasion is the years 1996 through 1999 when France outlawed all cryptography (2). Here they decided to force everyone to stop using encryption so they could monitor all network traffic. This was a significant set-back to business. French businesses were forced to conduct all Internet activity in the clear or suffer a lengthy bureaucratic process. Consequently, this had an unknown impact on France’s economy during the Internet Boom.
The second occasion is more recent where the French government disallowed the usage of Blackberry phones under the premise that the phones were susceptible to foreign surveillance. This is interesting because the French Directorate of Territorial Security mandates that all GSM phones use the A5/0 mode. This mode is derogatively referred to as the GSM “French Mode” as it disables phone encryption (3). Circumventing this mandate, Blackberry uses a 256-bit AES algorithm to encrypt all the information moving through the system (4). Were Blackberrys barred because the DTI could not monitor those communications?
Cryptography was crippled in both occasions and has negatively impacted French ability to conduct business on the Internet. Netcraft found in a 2002 study that France had the shortest key-lengths for SSL servers than any other western nation (5). Microsoft shipped crippled products because the French government would not allow strong encryption (6). The list goes on ad nausea. In short, France has trouble with technology and encryption.
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