Earlier this year, following the tragic events of early January in Paris, the French governement pushed a bill to put a legal framework around Intelligence Services activities. Far from protecting civil liberties, this bill seem to be the translation of Snowden's revelations into law.
Despite the fact this law was in the making for many years, its content seem to be inspired by Snowden's revelations.
French intelligent services, willing to become more independent from US ones were certainly waiting for this bill for a long time, giving them uncompared power on every one (IMSI Catchers, algorithmic black boxes in ISP networks, etc etc)
A patch to the law has been voted, legalizing international cable wiretapping for the DGSE (French NSA), providing them legal protection for what existed since at least 2008 as a NouvelObs journalist revealed some weeks ago.
In this talk, we'll also give an overview over the legal actions taken by several NGO's to defeat this laws.
Following the November 2015 Paris attacks and the declaration of a state of emergency, we'll extend the initial scope of the talk to give an overview of the latest securitarian/autharitarian developments in France.