Trouble with the Men in Black...

I have a friend, one of many of the feline persuasion, who has recently been instructed to destroy all data on their work PC because it was suspected that the local supercops were conducting an investigation on the company's behaviour over the last few months. This friend has kept a copy of all that data, and deleted the local copy as per company instructions. I, and another friend, have told them to get legal help ASAP. This made me think of my last brush-in with the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, which are in charge of counter-espionnage and domestic surveillance in France. Several years after I'd started working, I received a call from some Commander Sumfinorother at the Ministère de l'Interieur, asking me to show up at said Ministry. When asked why, all they'd say was that it had to do with my engineering degree. Took me a while, but by the time I showed up for the interview, I'd figured out that the issue was my end-of-year thesis, which was on certain properties of certain types of military hardware. And, indeed, that's what the Commander was unhappy about. Seems we should have asked for my thesis to be classified Secret Défense, which my teacher and I had neglected to do. It was, after all, little more than a recap of freely available information, in print or on the internet, followed with some low-level math and a little computer simulation. In any case, up I show, and after a firm handshake, the petite Commander walks back out of the building, telling me that if the interrogation were to take place here, we'd have to go four floors underground, and that'd be... the wrong atmosphere. I gulped and followed the Commander to the gas station a block over, where a little steel door opened on a small elevator leading up into the office building in the next lot. We badged, we PINcoded, and six flights up, we found ourselves in a plush corporate corridor with a thick red carpet. Red. Humm.... My warning lights were spining inside my head by the time we were sitting in the Commander's corner office, with an incredible view on the Seine and western Paris. Well, four hours and one goverment expert on said military hardware later, we established that they were quite impressed by my math, didn't want me to share it with anyone, and would protect me should anyone try to force it out of me. They offered me a job, which I declined, and as I was leaving, told me that, oh, by the way, I was now 'on file'. I asked what they meant by that, and the Commander told me : "Oh, don't worry, you're in good company. A real who's who of the rich and famous." Somehow, that didn't make me feel better. Location : Beauvais, France