France broadens tracking power

Legislature approves law for electronic surveillance

Sunday, December 15, 2013

PARIS - Despite their indignation when the scope of the United States’ mass data collection began to be made public, French intelligence services operate a similar system of electronic surveillance, with similarly minimal oversight.


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And last week, with little public debate, the Legislature approved an electronic-surveillance law that critics feared would markedly expand the collection of data on French citizens and businesses.

The provision, passed as part of a routine military spending bill, defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may gain access to or record telephone conversations, emails, Internet activity, personal location data and other electronic communications.

The law provides for no judicial oversight and allows electronic surveillance for a broad range of purposes, including “national security,” the protection of France’s “scientific and economic potential” and prevention of “terrorism” or “criminality.”

In an unusual alliance, Internet and corporate groups, human-rights organizations and a small number of lawmakers have opposed the law as a threat to business or an encroachment on individual rights.

The government argues that the law, which does not take effect until 2015, does little to expand intelligence powers. Rather, officials say, those powers have been in place for years, and the law creates rules where there had been none, notably with regard to real-time location tracking.

“If this article does effectively expand the existing regime to adapt it to the missions and reality of our intelligence services, it especially reinforces oversight as compared with the current situation,” Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told the Senate.

This argument suggests, analysts say, that the government has either staked out rights to a vast new range of surveillance practices, or acknowledged that it has already been collecting far more data, under far less regulated circumstances, than people knew.

“We feel that anything can be placed under the heading ‘national security,’” said Clemence Bectarte, a lawyer for the International Federation for Human Rights. The law, she said, expands the list of state administrations authorized to request electronic surveillance.

“There should have been a parliamentary commission and a real public debate,” she said.

The French intelligence agencies have little experience justifying their practices. Parliamentary oversight, for instance, did not begin until 2007.

The Association des Services Internet Communautaires, an advocacy group whose members include AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and several top French Internet companies, discovered the legislation essentially by chance.

“There was no consultation at all,” said Giuseppe de Martino, the association’s director and an executive at Dailymotion, the French online video service. “No one said anything about it to us.”

The National Commission for Information Technology and Freedoms, a state administration meant to protect the rights and privacy of citizens, said it had not been consulted on the contentious elements of the bill, though it was asked to review other provisions.

The government has denied any effort to shield the law from public scrutiny. The bill went through four votes in Parliament, noted one government official.

“Not exactly discreet, as maneuvers go,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The Association des Services Internet Communautaires said the law could give authorities blanket rights to seize “all documents stocked in a ‘cloud’ service subscribed by a given Internet user.” Currently, such a seizure would require a warrant, the group argued.

“We don’t know what this is going to mean in practice,” de Martino said. “But now the doors are open.”

French intelligence services are already reputed to be rapacious collectors of foreign industrial secrets, and there is some concern that the law could discourage international investment. Internet service companies worry that users may begin to turn away from the Internet or share their personal information less freely.

But Jean-Pierre Sueur, a senator from President Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party, said such provisions had been in place since the passage of an electronic intercepts law in 1991.

“If they’re angry about this, they ought to have been angry for 23 years,” he said. The law creates “only additional guarantees,” he said, and stricter rules for the approximately 200,000 intercept operations conducted by French intelligence services each year.

He rejected calls for judicial oversight, saying, “In the context of the anti-terror fight, day to day, it’s impossible.”

Front Section, Pages 10 on 12/15/2013