At the end of April, a draft of a new intelligence law was proposed by the government in France, which was amended with further articles a few weeks later.
The aim is to transfer measures such as house arrest and automated network surveillance by algorithms into general law. Some of the previous measures are also said to have violated European law, and so the French government hopes to defend them by transfer them in general French law. We want to give a brief overview of the planned secret service law. For example, social services will now be required to hand over confidential information on persons in question without invoking their professional secrecy. Secret services are also allowed to exchange information with each other, even if it was obtained illegally. To this end, telephone and internet providers are to be obliged to store communication data of their customers for one year, which explicitly violates European law. While it was previously common that the secret service had no infrastructure of its own in monitoring the internet through algorithms and was dependent on the providers, the planned law is now to allow that the data is delivered directly to the secret service and that it can do with it what it wants - so far also without a time limit according to the draft law. The providers of encrypted messenger services such as Telegram, Whatsapp, Signal etc. are also to be forced to cooperate with the secret service in order to monitor users.
Last but not least, the authority, which is allowed to control the secret services independently, is not supposed to have any binding effect in the matter of decisions. Only recommendations to check the legality of a measure may be issued by the authority.
