A French Version of NSA Electronic Surveillance Program?

Etienne Papin, a Paris-based lawyer expert in internet rights, explains the details of a bill that was approved by the French Senate on December 10: La loi de programmation militaire (Military Planning Act). He describes the bill as the French version of NSA mass electronic surveillance data mining program [fr] :

La législation existante permettait déjà une forme de « surveillance » du réseau par les services de renseignement. La surveillance dont on parle est, dans les faits, la possibilité pour certains services compétents de l'administration d'accéder aux « données de connexion » (schématiquement les logs) stockées par les opérateurs de communications électroniques : les opérateurs télécoms, les FAI et les hébergeurs…

The existing legislation already allows a form of “surveillance” of the web and social networks by the intelligence services. The surveillance that we are talking about here is, in fact, the possibility for some agencies of the administration to access “data connection” logs stored by electronic communications operators services: telecom operators, ISPs and hosts…

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