The dubious thesis that to defend freedom and democracy we are entitled to curtail both is a dangerous erosion of democratic values and a slippery slope that France appears to be heading down. The lower house of its parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly backed a raft of measures that will give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data. And without judicial oversight.
The move is a response to the January terrorist attacks in Paris which included Charlie Hebdo and left 17 people dead. But, ironically it comes as the US Congress reconsiders broad post-9/11 surveillance powers and in Germany revelations of widespread state tapping are provoking strong demands to rein in government surveillance.
Interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, insists that “the measures proposed are not aimed at installing generalised surveillance. On the contrary, it aims to target people who we need to monitor to protect the French people.” But the targeting will happen precisely through general surveillance – the sifting of metadata by computers to find interesting/suspicious words and links which can then be reviewed, “targeted”, by human eyes.
The legislation will allow the intelligence services in "terrorism" inquiries to tap cellphones, read emails and force internet providers to comply with requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers' communications and includes bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that conducted by the US National Security Agency. The spooks could also request the right to put hidden mikes in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers, or to place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages.
The head of the Paris bar association Pierre-Olivier Sur warns that the measures may be used against anyone the government considers disruptive, a view endorsed by the the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, Gérard Biard. "I think that opportunistic laws are always bad laws," he complains.
The Bill now goes to the Senate. Time to think again.