France’s latest foreign interference bill questions democratic control over surveillance services

On Wednesday (27 March), French MPs backed a bill to expand intelligence services competencies to monitor networks, re-opening a debate on democratic control of these agencies.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2015, France passed a sweeping Intelligence Law which empowered its intelligence services to install devices on telecom infrastructures using algorithms to detect suspicious behaviour online.

But at the moment, intelligence services are only allowed to detect suspicious behaviour related to terrorism. Wednesday’s vote aims to expand the scope of the Intelligence Law to foreign influence. The bill is expected to be discussed in the Senate in April.

“Compared to other European countries, there is a lack of safeguards and transparency in France regarding what is actually implemented by intelligence services,” Noémie Levain, head of legal and political analysis at French digital advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, told Euractiv.

Levain is concerned that the new foreign interference bill presents threats to privacy and civil liberties since the algorithms used for surveillance are secret and not available for scrutiny.

In 2020, La Quadrature du Net lost a lawsuit against the French government over the Intelligence Law.

The Court of Justice of the EU ruled that a state could “recourse to automated analysis” and “retain, generally and indiscriminately, traffic and location data” when confronted with a serious threat to national security.

Yet the Court set a number of conditions for the use of automated analysis in surveillance, including reviews by an independent authority, such as a privacy watchdog.

The Intelligence Law was reviewed in 2017 and permanently put into law in 2021. The French data privacy authority CNIL delivered opinions on the various implementing decrees that enforced the laws.

Opposition

When first tabled, the new foreign influence bill did not foresee such checks and balances, so MP Philippe Latombe (MoDem, Renew), a member of CNIL, suggested an amendment to empower the CNIL to give an opinion on the implementing decree. He told Euractiv that it seemed to be a “logical” inclusion “as we are dealing with something very intrusive”.

He explained that, under the proposed amendment, “the functioning of the algorithms will not be public, but the opinion of the CNIL will be”. Latombe said he was ultimately motivated to give democratic guarantees to the opposition parties.

MP Élisa Martin (LFI, The Left) opposed the new surveillance bill, arguing that the way foreign influence is defined in the draft is too vague. The current draft conflates different types of foreign interference, whether that is by other countries or NGOs.

In the accompanying statement of her amendment, Martin wrote: “The development of the ‘technopolice’ that has been unfolding over the past decade – body cameras, onboard cameras, drones, real-time image transmission, use of ‘smart’ algorithms, etc – must come to an end.”

[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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