The web activists 'debugging' France's surveillance laws
Internet activists-turned lawyers are using computer and coding skills to find errors or “bugs” lurking in France's growing array of surveillance and intelligence laws. Calling themselves “amateur scholars”, they have so far drawn up around ten legal challenges as a result of their work. As Michel Deléan and Jérôme Hourdeaux report, these 'hacktivists' are in the vanguard of numerous judicial challenges to this controversial snooping legislation.
AA group of internet activists, writers of computer code and lawyers are waging legal guerilla warfare against the raft of new surveillance laws being rushed through by the French government. These 'hacktivists' painstakingly sift through all sections of the new laws and decrees that implement them, looking for mistakes rather as computer coders go through code line by line looking for 'bugs'.
