If politics is the art of not saying what you really think, then Axelle Lemaire is a great politician. For the last three months the junior government minister with responsibility for the digital sector has done her best to keep a low profile in order to avoid having to comment on the French government's new snooping law, the loi renseignement.
On occasions, however, she has been obliged to discuss the deeply controversial measure in public. For example, in an interview with LCI television on April 27th, 2015, Axelle Lemaire defended the measure while saying as little as possible. Then in early June the minister, faced with internet specialists and opponents of the law at a meeting organised by the web-based think-tank Thinkerview, Lemaire seemed in some difficulty as she repeated the government's official line on the measure. This should come as no great surprise: the junior minister does not agree with the new law but has been careful not to say so publicly.
Ever since the proposed legislation was unveiled to ministers on March 19th, 2015, Axelle Lemaire has had to endure the criticism coming from her sector of responsibility, the digital community. Web hosting and other French tech companies have threatened to quit the country over revelations that the surveillance law will allow the “real-time capture of data” by France's intelligence agencies using “black boxes” connected to networks. And web entrepreneurs as well as official civil liberties bodies have condemned the legislation. Meanwhile Axelle Lemaire, a lawyer who was once the Socialist Party's secretary for human rights, has been put in the position of having to sell a security law to the digital community. “I've been on my best behaviour but every day I've thought about resigning,” she has told former colleagues at the National Assembly where she was an MP before being promoted to the government. But nonetheless she is still in her post.
From now on, however, Axelle Lemaire can start to relax. The law has all but completed its rapid passage through the French Parliament – using emergency procedures – after a joint committee of MPs and senators agreed yesterday, Tuesday June 16th, on its final form. It now faces one last vote from both chambers on June 24th, before becoming law. Already the French secret services are impatient for a package of measures that fulfills their wildest dreams. For though the US Congress recently voted to unpick some of the most intrusive surveillance brought in under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, France, affected by the emotional impact of the terror attacks in January of this year, is in the process of adopting a measure worthy of the 'Big Brother' label. This has been done with the seeming approval of the French public, and without MPs and senators apparently fully understanding what they have voted for.
After the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in January prime minister Manuel Valls himself warned against the risk of adopting “exceptional measures”. But his declarations were soon forgotten. Just a few weeks after a law on terrorism had been passed, this new legislation - which in effect legalises the current illegal practices of the intelligence services - was drawn up. The measures were pulled together by the socialist president of the National Assembly's law committee, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, an ally of Manuel Valls, and academic Floran Vadillo. They contain just about everything that the secret services have been asking for. This includes wide-ranging justification for the use of intrusive surveillance, making it easier to snoop on and intercept communications and extending the length of time that recovered data can be kept. There will be a body that will oversee the use of surveillance, the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Techniques de Renseignement (CNCTR), but it has limited powers. Overall the law creates a smaller, French version of the American National Security Agency.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“Under [Nicolas] Sarkozy there would have been three million demonstrators, with [justice minister Christiane] Taubira at the front,” says senator Claude Malhuret of the right-wing Les Républicains (LR – previously the UMP) who opposed the bill, which was adopted by the French Senate by an overwhelming majority on both the Left and Right. But the streets of France this spring remained silent. The opinion polls and focus groups of which this government is so fond explain why: the French people support the law. And yet human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the Fédération internationale des droits de l’homme have raised the alarm, as did the lawyers' professional body the Syndicat des Avocats de France. Meanwhile human and digital rights bodies and officials such as the Conseil National du Numérique, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the Défenseur des Droits, the Commission Nationale Consultative des Droits de l’Homme (CNCDH) and Parliament’s own Commission Numérique de l’Assemblée Nationale have issued scathing reports on the proposed legislation.
Christine Lazerges, who is a lawyer and president of the CNCDH, denounces the rapid passage of the bill as “totally inappropriate”. She says: “This law represents such a change in the law! I am astounded that they allowed this to be legislated on so quickly, on an issue that changes the law and public freedoms to such an extent.”
Yet inside the bubble that surrounds the interior ministry and the prime minister's official residence, Matignon, the protests of civic society were just a distant background noise. At Matignon, for example, there was never any question of being swayed by defenders of public freedoms who, according to one official in the prime minister's office, “live in a dream world”. In an unusual step, Manuel Valls himself presented the bill to the National Assembly in April and then again to the Senate in June, each time with the support of the president, François Hollande. To reassure those who protested against the measure, the president said he would himself refer key parts of the legislation to the country's top constitutional body the Constitutional Council.
But in broad form the text of the legislation has scarcely changed since it was first presented to Parliament. Axelle Lemaire fought discreetly but lost a number of battles over the substance of the text. However, the government did agree not to attack the practice of encrypting private conversations and accepted that a member of the telecoms regulator ARCEP should be on the new CNCTR, which saw its powers increased. The length of time that collected data can be kept was also reduced.
“It's not Big Brother, that's not true. Some criticism has been excessive,” says Jean-Pierre Sueur, the socialist senator in charge of guiding the legislation through the Senate. He adds: “That doesn’t mean that there are not problems.” In fact the legislation's real problem areas still remain: the black boxes with their algorithms connected to the web hosting firms and networks that will seek to detect the profiles of potential suspects from their online behaviour; the 'IMSI catchers' that will intercept mobile phone communications; and the unknown impact of storing millions of pieces of information that have been recovered, despite warnings from the digital watchdog CNIL, which was not involved in the drafting of the legislation.
'We're in a state of war'
In the media and in Parliament it was left to the interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, courteous and strident in equal measure, to sell the new law to the French public and their elected representatives. “He's been grandstanding,” says an astonished old colleague of his. In private Cazeneuve remains angry with those who attack the law, whom he dismisses as “tech-heads”. The defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, meanwhile, has displayed his lack of grasp of the technical details of the legislation. During his hearing in front of the Senate the minister was clearly reading from notes and spoke of “algorisms” rather than “algorithms”, a mistake that led to much mockery on the internet. “I am not a great specialist but I am a practitioner,” explained Le Drian, the minister behind Hollande's wars and who at every opportunity talks of the “external threats” that target France.
As for economy minister Emmanuel Macron, who is in overall charge of digital issues, he has remained silent on the issue. And though in 2009 the Socialist Party (PS) was up in arms against antiterrorism measures then which it said would create a France where freedoms would be “under surveillance”, many members of the socialist government have backed the current measures with little hesitation. An example is civil service minister Marylise Lebranchu, who was justice minister under prime minister Lionel Jospin at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and who has said: “We're in a state of war. And in this war the rule of law that we dream of is not well-adapted.”
More reticent ministers, those who are less gung-ho on law and order issues, have kept their views to themselves. None of them has dared to oppose a law backed by the president and prime minister, and supported by public opinion in the wake of the Paris terror attacks. “We saw that it stank, we kept well away from it,” says the advisor of one prominent minister. Meanwhile a colleague of his insisted that he had not had time to go through the detail of the legislation, but at the same time he casually praised the merits of a letter from Edward Snowden, the whistleblower behind the revelations about the surveillance activities of the NSA, that had been published in Libération in early June. The letter had the evocative headline: “While you are reading this, the government is taking note.”
Justice minister Christiane Taubira, meanwhile, has been conspicuous in her absence from the debate over the snooping law. In a radio interview with Europe 1 in May she did suggest, in a convoluted manner, that she would have demonstrated against the bill had she not been in government. But in the course of that interview the minister became irritated by repeated questioning which highlighted her own contradictions, and managed to lose listeners in her legal meanderings. “Her office has done nothing,” says one friend, disappointed that the minister has not been more combative. In inter-departmental meetings she only appears when her own administration is the object of discussion.
Why has she kept so quiet? “Following the departure of [economy minister Arnaud] Montebourg, [culture minister Aurélie] Filippetti and myself, she has been a lot more isolated than before in the government,” explains former education minister Benoît Hamon, who left the ministerial team with his colleagues in August 2014. An MP who knows and admires Taubira adds: “It's also a problem of political culture and generation. She hasn't really integrated these issues into her political thinking.” When the bill was being examined in the National Assembly Christiane Taubira claimed that she was stopping the new measures turning prison wardens into unofficial agents of the intelligence services. But she was thwarted by an unholy alliance between a handful of MPs on the right of the PS – led by Jean-Jacques Urvoas – and the right-wing opposition. It was yet another sign of the way in which many socialist MPs have been won over by arguments on law and order.
In any case, the socialists were preoccupied with other concerns this spring, notably the internal debates ahead of the party conference held in Poitiers and the never-ending saga of the economic reform bill known as the loi Macron. Debates on the surveillance law took place in near-empty chambers in both the National Assembly and the Senate. And the Left and the Right in both chambers voted the bill through with overwhelming majorities. The opposition came from communists, most greens and liberals from the centre and Right who were worried about seeing the state given such extensive surveillance powers. They were also joined by some socialists, not all of whom were the usual rebels.
Among this last group were Nicolas Bays, vice-chairman of the Assembly's defence committee, and Laurent Grandguillaume, who is usually classified as an ultra-loyal Hollande supporter. “I would have liked us to have had a real discussion about algorithms,” says Grandguillaume. “The Left in government is not open to criticism of a techno-digital approach to the world and to the all-seeing society that is emerging, that is a shame. Those who have warned about it have not been taken seriously.”
In each camp opponents have been dismissed with similar arguments. “You haven't understood anything,” agriculture minister Stéphane Le Foll and Jean-Marie Le Guen, minister in charge of Parliamentary relations, have told dissenting socialists. “Be serious, you can't vote against it,” one Les Républicains (LR) Parliamentarian told a right-wing dissenter. “The Left is paralysed by the fear that it will be accused of being soft and does all it can to dispel this idea. As for the Right, it is largely pro-security and can't imagine voting against a text of this nature,” says the LR senator Claude Malhuret. “However, many Parliamentarians sense there is a problem. Some people in my camp who favour the law tell me that I am asking the right questions and some have even apologised to me for having backed the text!”
Sébastien Crozier, a member of the Socialist Party in Paris, and member of the management union the CFE-CGC, criticises the total absence of debate within his own party. “The principal problem with this law is that Parliamentarians don’t even understand what you are talking to them about. They are overwhelmed,” he says. Another socialist, the senator Gaëtan Gorce, notes: “The digital culture of elected representatives is not a deep one. For them the issue of login data, of their storage, seems to be of a level of complexity for which they are unprepared, and which very often does not really fascinate them.” Gorce himself has been highly critical of the legislation but abstained rather than voted against it out of “friendship” for his former neighbour on the benches of the National Assembly – Manuel Valls.
“In this instance the division is not between Left and Right but between those elected representatives who understand what they are talking about and those who haven't done their homework,” says Laure de la Raudière, an MP for Les Républicains, and who voted against the measure.
In the meantime, when the law goes onto the statute books in the coming weeks France will have acquired an arsenal of surveillance measures which are the most intrusive in Europe. “We’ve opened the doors without knowing where they might lead or whether the guarantees put in place will be adapted to technological progress. We have made the error of thinking that by gathering millions of bits of information we be will safer,” says CNCDH president Christine Lazerges.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter