France, all intelligence requests for Internet monitoring

7 July 20222 years ago babelfish

The article by Giuseppe Gagliano

The law on military appropriations 2019-2025, also called Loi de Programmation Militaire, or LPM, is in the process of approving the French president. By leveraging the gravity of the current situation determined by the war between Ukraine and Russia, all the French security services – namely the DGSE, the DRM (Direction du Renseignement Militaire) and the DRSD (Direction du Renseignement et de la Sécurité de la Défense ) – are making significant pressure to obtain advantages of great importance from an operational point of view, but which nevertheless challenge some principles consolidated by European democracies.

What exactly are we talking about?

Turning our attention to the DGSE, it is putting pressure on it in order to be able to acquire all Internet browsing data (i.e. so-called cookies) from private operators in order to make online data collection more efficient. If this possibility arises, it could certainly improve the understanding of Internet users. As it happens, in France there is an industry that deals specifically with this possibility, Criteo.

Another request by the same service to the French government is to make the computer operations – or, better, the computer wiretapping – that take place both in the civil and military spheres equivalent; this would mean being able to exempt civilian security services from any criminal convictions, giving them their own impunity ope legis .

Another request no less significant than the previous ones is the possibility that the data collected by the DGSE are transmitted directly to an ad hoc body, the CNCTR (Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Techniques de Renseignement), without first going through the prime minister. If this proposal is made by the DGSE, this is possible because the new president of the CNCTR, Serge Lasvignes, is in favor of this proposal.

Finally, there is another proposal that certainly can only arouse real opposition from the French Council of State: in fact, the DGSE asks that the time limit for monitoring URL addresses goes from the current 30 days to 120 days and he also asks that the archiving of data, which currently lasts for 30 days, can even go up to a year.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/intelligence-francia-internet/ on Wed, 06 Jul 2022 05:21:39 +0000.