No French PRISM Program

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/228859/no-french-prism-program/

No French PRISM Program
Le Monde, France
By Philippe Aigrain
Translated By Wade Halliburton
17 December 2013
Edited by Bora Mici

~snip~

This text is identical to the one voted on during the first hearing, on Dec. 3, in the National Assembly. Therefore, the bill has passed, and, within it is the highly contested Article 20. This article focuses on access to "information or documents processed or preserved by" the networks of web providers or electronic communications services, "including the technical data relating to the identification of numbers of subscription or connection to electronic communications services." It indicates that such information and documents "can be collected on solicitation of the network and transmitted in real time by the operators." What's more, the debate around this article continues in the hope of seeing it result in a referral to the Constitutional Council by lawmakers.

Some claim to be able to put an end to this debate by affirming that the article would not be more than a cosmetic trim for existing provisions, ensuring their readability, or even that it would act more as a monitor for certain rights. According to them, opposition comes only from misinformation disseminated by the Association of Community Internet Services, some of whose members are major collectors and exploiters of personal data.

We confirm the government's inaction in protecting its own citizens from the severe violation of their fundamental rights through surveillance. Far from granting asylum to Edward Snowden, for a time, it transformed itself into an auxiliary police at the behest of the United States during the prohibited flyover of the Bolivian president's plane over our territory. Since then, France has agreed for the European Council to defer to 2015 the adoption of new European regulations on the protection of data.

Have they suspended the agreement on the sphere of security — the Safe Harbor Agreement — which allows the transfer of personal data to the United States, as the member states have the right to do when facing such a clear violation? And in the end, here, we have adopted a text that opens the door to the same abuse as the 2008 FISA Amendment Act, the legal basis invoked by the NSA to justify the PRISM program.