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Cryptology and international relations
Cryptology has experienced a major liberalization in most States during the last decade. This development has been mainly motivated by business considerations related to the e-commerce. However, cryptology remains, as it was in the past, a highly strategic field for some nations. Intelligence services and their intercepting skills have a major role to play faced with new asymmetrical threats, and encrypting products can make this tapping completely useless. Thus, in spite of actual (...)
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The Echelon network and the US information power
Born out of a secret agreement made between allies during the second world war, the network, code name Echelon, has been placed under the authority of the National Security Agency (NSA). Nowadays, it stands out as an integral part of a reticular hegemonic dynamics, which is both offensive and defensive, and has political as well as cultural and economic implications. The will, expressed by the United States, to lay out a planetary monitoring system, with the legitimate goal of maintaining (...)
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The international management of great programs in scientific research
International co-operation in particle physics has been a model for 50 years. The success of CERN, the large European Laboratory for Particle Physics located near Geneva, is praised world-wide. CERN is an intergovernmental organization. The constitutive Convention of CERN, signed in Paris in 1953, has provided CERN with its own legal personality, enjoying an international status. CERN currently comprises 20 Member States, each being endowed with one vote in the Council, which makes all the (...)
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Transposing Directive 98/44, July 6th, 1998, concerning the juridical protection
The directive adopted on July 6th, 1998, concerning the juridical protection of biotechnological inventions, should have been transposed by States members on July 30th, 2000, at the latest. Yet, in autumn 2002, six member States had transposed the directive into their home law. In France as in some other countries, a strong reluctance to transpose this text has surfaced ; its adoption had already given rise to nearly ten years of proceedings and debates. If the reasons for this reluctance (...)
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International Stakes of Internet Democratization and the French Approach to the "Numerical Fracture"
A few months ago, talking about the numerical revolution, Jacques Chirac evoked the danger of a growing gap, even of a fracture, between the regions, between North and South, in economical and cultural terms. This specter has not yet provoked a coordinated answer from the international authorities (UNESCO, UNDP, etc.). This article investigates how the present technical revolution and the dangers it brings forth are understood by state actors in a period in which the needs are booming (the (...)
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Technology and Security after September 11th 2001
The attacks on September 11th, 2001 are a sophisticated technical operation in their aims as well as in their elaboration, their coordination, and their execution. At the same time, the attacks have dramatically proved the vulnerabilities of open and developed societies, especially the limits of the security technologies they use against major threats. Thus, not only was all of the United States’ security technology unable to detect and prevent on time acts which were deemed possible and (...)
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"Echelon" : origins and perspectives of a transnational debate
The history of the development of "UKUSA", between the United States and four other countries of Anglo-Saxon origin in the area of electronic information, demonstrate that "Echelon" is not a new system of interception, but rather a program of information and of automated integration of movements intercepted by the different listening stations that participate with UKUSA. The discovery of the amplitude of these interceptions, and of the "Echelon" program which facilitates their exploitation (...)
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International regulation of the Internet. Responsibility systems and authors rights
The Internet is a form of media among many others, and it is therefore subject to media regulating laws even if it the are difficult to apply and in need of adaptations. The biggest obstacle is presented by the international aspect of the Internet, while media law remains essentially national. Focusing more on author’s rights than on responsibility systems, a number of international conventions and European directives have contributed to a harmonization of national laws, in the direction of (...)
