There’s a lot of news going around today about the French Government’s new policy to allow police to remotely take over a suspect’s devices, with access to cameras, microphones and GPS data. But if you think that’s uncommon, you’d be very mistaken.

Promising it would only be used in “dozens of cases per year,” French Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti yesterday welcomed new legislation allowing such spying for up to six months, where approved by a judge, in cases where possible sentences are at least five years. “We’re far away from the totalitarianism of 1984,” he added. “People’s lives will be saved.”

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Clearly, it feels like the most obscene invasion of privacy that some police or government operative could hack into your phone and casually observe a livestream of your life. And clearly, it opens the door to casual abuses of civil liberties by people in positions of power, as well as more focused abuses of that power by bad-faith actors.

Read more: New Atlas