France’s Intelligence Bill: legalising mass surveillance

The French government claims its new Intelligence Bill is defined in opposition to the American and British models – but this just doesn't hold once the text is examined - Quite the contrary! 
Recently French Prime Minister Manuel Valls organised a press conference to announce the Intelligence Bill that his government had just adopted and was presenting to Parliament. Confronting the media, Valls sought to dismiss growing concerns that the bill, the contents of which had been leaked to the press a few days earlier, would undermine the right to privacy. “This has nothing to do with the generalised surveillance of citizens”, Valls said to journalists. He even went on to claim that the bill would “forbid” mass surveillance.
 
This posture came all the more naturally to the French Government as it has kept its head down and weathered the storm since the Snowden disclosures began almost two years ago. Even when documents exposing the cooperation between the French General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) and the NSA and other Five-Eyes agencies (the LUSTRE agreement) came to light, public officials either refrained from any comment or issued denials. Today, the Valls government is claiming that the bill is simply a matter of securing the legitimate intelligence collection practices of the French security services, which hitherto lacked a proper legal framework.
These reassurances, however, do not survive proper scrutiny. A close reading of the Bill shows that it authorises the government to engage in preventive surveillance of private communications and public spaces for a broad range of motives – from terrorism to economic espionage and the monitoring of social movements – without proper ex ante control. It also orchestrates the legal whitewashing of mass surveillance, and legalizes tools and policies that directly echo those of other surveillance superpowers, like the US, the UK or Germany. Three examples are particularly telling.
The most fiercely debated item of the bill relates to so-called Internet “black boxes” aimed at detecting terrorist threats. Article 2 makes provision for the Prime Minister to require telecom operators and online platforms to install technical devices on their infrastructure (networks or servers) that will use custom algorithms to detect suspicious online behaviour.
According to examples quoted by government ministers and high-ranking officials in the intelligence community, the goal is to detect the use of particular encryption protocols or web browsing habits. Though the government denies this is the case, there is every indication that these black boxes will deploy some kind of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology.
From a British and American perspective, these black boxes are hardly news. In the UK, a similar provision was debated as early as 2000, and eventually subsumed in the Regulatory Investigative Powers Act, section 12. More recently, documents leaked by Mark Klein, a former AT&T employee turned whistleblower, revealed that the NSA had implemented DPI technologies to monitor Internet traffic on US soil.
Traditionally surveillance has been justified by the practical limitations to the ability of states to engage in mass surveillance outside of their territory. But in the age of global and digital communications networks, where whole civilian populations have become subject to systematic surveillance, this outdated “laissez-faire” approach does not only completely negate the universality of human rights when it comes to foreigners. It also leads to opportunistic strategies where the cross-border nature of communications is used to bypass the checks-and-balances that protect the state's own citizens, all within the comfort of the national territory.
Open Democracy: http://bit.ly/1EyXKUr