During a rally against the new Intelligence Bill in Paris, April 2015. Demotix/Yann Korbi. All rights reserved.
On 19 March , French Prime Minister Manuel Valls organised a press conference to announce the Intelligence Bill that his government had just adopted and was presenting to Parliament. Confronting the media, Valls sought to dismiss growing concerns that the bill, the contents of which had been leaked to the press a few days earlier, would undermine the right to privacy. “This has nothing to do with the generalised surveillance of citizens”, Valls said to journalists. He even went on to claim that the bill would “forbid” mass surveillance.
This posture came all the more naturally to the French Government as it has kept its head down and weathered the storm since the Snowden disclosures began almost two years ago. Even when documents exposing the cooperation between the French General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) and the NSA and other Five-Eyes agencies (the LUSTRE agreement) came to light, public officials either refrained from any comment or issued denials. Today, the Valls government is claiming that the bill is simply a matter of securing the legitimate intelligence collection practices of the French security services, which hitherto lacked a proper legal framework.
