French seek vast expansion of surveillance
Lower house approves bill on domestic spying; Senate OK likely
French lawmakers overwhelmingly approve a measure that could give authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.
PARIS — At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, 2001, the lower house of the French parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.
The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January, including at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher grocery, that left 17 people dead.
As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who are cycling to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad — often lured over the Internet — the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.
The provisions, as currently outlined, would allow them to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications.
Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is the bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.
The intelligence services could also request a right to put tiny microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers or place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages.
Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.
“The last intelligence law was done in 1991, when there were neither cellphones nor Internet,” said Manuel Valls, the prime minister, who took the unusual step early last month of personally presenting the bill to the National Assembly.
Indeed, the move by the lower house of parliament underscored the fervent debate going on across Europe over how best to balance civil liberties and privacy rights against mounting threats to security in an age of rising extremism and global interconnectivity.
Last month, virtually by a fluke, the French authorities uncovered an apparent plot to attack at least one church near Paris by a gunman who appeared to have been encouraged solely over the Internet by handlers in Syria, without ever having gone there to enlist in jihad.
The growth of global communication, however, has also encouraged governments toward expansive and sometimes unchecked surveillance powers, as the leaks from the NSA’s files by a former contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed in 2013.