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.
It's not much of a base.