Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Hugh Schofield on France's new surveillance rules 
 
 The French parliament has approved a controversial law strengthening the intelligence services, with the aim of preventing Islamist attacks. 
 
 The law on intelligence-gathering, adopted by 438 votes to 86, was drafted after three days of attacks in Paris in January, in which 17 people died. 
 
 The Socialist government says the law is needed to take account of changes in communications technology. 
 
 But critics say it is a dangerous extension of mass surveillance. 
 
 They argue that it gives too much power to the state and threatens the independence of the digital economy. 
 
 Main provisions of the new law: 
 
 Image copyright AFP Image caption The government says it needs better surveillance to combat the terrorist threat 
 
 Define the purposes for which secret intelligence-gathering may be used 
 
 Set up a supervisory body, the National Commission for Control of Intelligence Techniques (CNCTR), with wider rules of operation 
 
 Authorise new methods, such as the bulk collection of metadata via internet providers 
 
 Surveillance law prompts unease in France 
 
 Paris attacks: Three days of terror 
 
 The government says it wants to bring modern surveillance techniques within the law rather than outside any system of control. 
 
 A new watchdog will oversee the intelligence services, which will have broader powers to look at classified material and handle complaints from the public. 
 
 But none of this has satisfied the critics, who range from civil liberties groups to major internet providers. 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Protests against the new surveillance measures have been held in Paris 
 
 Their main worry is the way French intelligence agencies will be able to collect massive amounts of metadata from the internet - the detail of communications such as times and places rather than content. 
 
 Critics say this amounts to a mass intrusion of privacy, which in the hands of an unscrupulous government could have worrying consequences. 
 
 Apart from some dissident voices, both the governing Socialists and opposition centre-right were in favour. 
 
 One online advocacy group, La Quadrature du Net, wrote after the vote: "Representatives of the French people have given the Prime Minister the power to undertake massive and limitless surveillance of the population. 
 
 "By doing so, they're ensuring that the power of the state and the basis of our democratic system are getting ever more distant from one another." 
 
 Image copyright AP Image caption Those opposed to the proposed new law say that it will allow the government to keep a record of innocuous conversations 
 
 Analysis by Hugh Schofield, BBC, Paris 
 
 It has been an unusual debate. Many in the Socialist Party who would normally have spoken out against the new powers have instead kept quiet. In the wake of the January attacks, there is little political mileage in raising doubts about the intelligence services. 
 
 Meanwhile on the right, with its clearer law-and-order tradition, most MPs support the Socialist bill. But some are opposed on points of principle. Irony of ironies, some of the harshest criticism has come from the Front National. 
 
 The consensus means that the powerful civil liberties arguments have had little of an airing in the National Assembly. In some sessions there were no more than a handful of deputies in attendance. 
 
 But the opposition from outside the chamber has been vocal. Not necessarily from the public at large (who by and large sympathise with the government's argument) but from rights groups, the press, and Internet companies. 
 
 Surveillance law prompts unease in France ||||| French lawmakers voted in favour Tuesday of a new law granting the state sweeping surveillance powers, despite criticism from civil society groups that have dubbed the bill the “French Patriot Act”. 
 
 The bill passed the National Assembly with 438 votes in favour and just 86 against after it gained the backing of the two main parties – the ruling Socialists and the centre-right UMP. The bill will now go up before the French parliament’s upper house, the Senate, in June. 
 
 The latest intelligence bill is one of several government reforms in the wake of the January 7-9 Paris attacks that left 17 dead. France remains on high alert and has received repeated threats from jihadist groups, including the Islamic State (IS) group in the Syria-Iraq region. 
 
 Rights groups, however, have slammed the new proposals, calling the raft of measures a “French Big Brother”. 
 
 Speaking to FRANCE 24 Tuesday, Felix Tréguer, founder of La Quadrature du Net -- a Paris-based group defending cyber rights --, warned that civil liberties were being overlooked in the push for reforms following the January attacks. 
 
 “The fact is the law was being prepared for a long time,” said Tréguer. “The bill’s advocates wanted a legal framework for the French intelligence agencies, which is a good thing. But the government is actually using the Paris attacks as an excuse for acting against terrorism, but the law is much broader than that. The range of motives that can be invoked to engage in intelligence collection include industrial and scientific espionage, monitoring social movements and so on.” 
 
 The authors of the bill, however, deny it will be used for mass surveillance and reject comparisons with the US Patriot Act passed a month after the September 11, 2001, attacks. 
 
 "We are not going for widespread monitoring because the US [case] has shown that to be useless,” said Jean-Jacques Urvoas, a Socialist Party MP. “This is not going to be run on a predictive basis, we simply aim to ensure enhanced monitoring of those identified as threats.” 
 
 In the ‘realm of the intelligence superpowers’ 
 
 Under the bill, private residences can be monitored using geo-location measures, mobile communications can be intercepted, and web usage and communication can be monitored with the help of so-called “black boxes” attached to servers. 
 
 Black boxes are complex algorithms that Internet providers will be forced to install to flag up a pattern of suspicious behaviour online and are among the most controversial of the bill’s proposals 
 
 A poll published last month showed that nearly two-thirds of French people were in favour of restricting freedoms in the name of fighting extremism. 
 
 Only 32 percent of those surveyed in the CSA poll for the Atlantico news website said they were opposed to freedoms being reduced, although this proportion rose significantly among young people. 
 
 Civil rights activists say the measures are not aimed solely at the prevention of terrorism but also will be used for foreign policy, as well as economic and scientific interests. 
 
 “The French intelligence agencies do not have the budget and financial means of the [USA’s] NSA (National Security Agency), but the logic behind some of the bill’s provisions perfectly mirrors what’s going on in the US and the UK in terms of the very broadly defined regime of international surveillance,” said Tréguer. “The bill is a way for France to retain its rank in the realm of the intelligence superpowers…the bill is a way of continuing the arms race in terms of accumulating new surveillance powers.” 
 
 French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, however, has fiercely defended the bill, saying that to compare it to the mass surveillance "Patriot Act" introduced in the United States after the 9/11 attacks was a "lie". 
 
 He has pointed out that the previous law on wiretapping dates back to 1991, "when there were no mobile phones or Internet," which makes the new bill crucial in the face of extremist threats. 
 
 (FRANCE 24 with AFP) 
 
 Date created : 2015-05-05 ||||| The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. 
 
 The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. 
 
 The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing. 
 
 The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. 
 
 Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered. 
 
 The disclosure is likely to reignite longstanding debates in the US over the proper extent of the government's domestic spying powers. 
 
 Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama. 
 
 The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. 
 
 The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order. 
 
 The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI's request for its customers' records, or the court order itself. 
 
 "We decline comment," said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman. 
 
 The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compels Verizon to produce to the NSA electronic copies of "all call detail records or 'telephony metadata' created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls". 
 
 The order directs Verizon to "continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order". It specifies that the records to be produced include "session identifying information", such as "originating and terminating number", the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and "comprehensive communication routing information". 
 
 The information is classed as "metadata", or transactional information, rather than communications, and so does not require individual warrants to access. The document also specifies that such "metadata" is not limited to the aforementioned items. A 2005 court ruling judged that cell site location data – the nearest cell tower a phone was connected to – was also transactional data, and so could potentially fall under the scope of the order. 
 
 While the order itself does not include either the contents of messages or the personal information of the subscriber of any particular cell number, its collection would allow the NSA to build easily a comprehensive picture of who any individual contacted, how and when, and possibly from where, retrospectively. 
 
 It is not known whether Verizon is the only cell-phone provider to be targeted with such an order, although previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks. It is also unclear from the leaked document whether the three-month order was a one-off, or the latest in a series of similar orders. 
 
 The court order appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration's surveillance activities. 
 
 For roughly two years, the two Democrats have been stridently advising the public that the US government is relying on "secret legal interpretations" to claim surveillance powers so broad that the American public would be "stunned" to learn of the kind of domestic spying being conducted. 
 
 Because those activities are classified, the senators, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, have been prevented from specifying which domestic surveillance programs they find so alarming. But the information they have been able to disclose in their public warnings perfectly tracks both the specific law cited by the April 25 court order as well as the vast scope of record-gathering it authorized. 
 
 Julian Sanchez, a surveillance expert with the Cato Institute, explained: "We've certainly seen the government increasingly strain the bounds of 'relevance' to collect large numbers of records at once — everyone at one or two degrees of separation from a target — but vacuuming all metadata up indiscriminately would be an extraordinary repudiation of any pretence of constraint or particularized suspicion." The April order requested by the FBI and NSA does precisely that. 
 
 The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. That is the provision which Wyden and Udall have repeatedly cited when warning the public of what they believe is the Obama administration's extreme interpretation of the law to engage in excessive domestic surveillance. 
 
 In a letter to attorney general Eric Holder last year, they argued that "there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows." 
 
 "We believe," they wrote, "that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act. 
 
 Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication. 
 
 Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack. 
 
 The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program. 
 
 These recent events reflect how profoundly the NSA's mission has transformed from an agency exclusively devoted to foreign intelligence gathering, into one that focuses increasingly on domestic communications. A 30-year employee of the NSA, William Binney, resigned from the agency shortly after 9/11 in protest at the agency's focus on domestic activities. 
 
 In the mid-1970s, Congress, for the first time, investigated the surveillance activities of the US government. Back then, the mandate of the NSA was that it would never direct its surveillance apparatus domestically. 
 
 At the conclusion of that investigation, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the investigative committee, warned: "The NSA's capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter." 
 
 Additional reporting by Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman
– See if this sounds familiar: A nation reeling from a major terror attack puts into place sweeping new surveillance rules in the name of public safety that critics think violate civil liberties. A measure with the nickname the "French Patriot Act" cleared the lower house of Parliament in France today, reports France24. The legislation now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, reports the New York Times, which provides some specifics: The provisions would let intelligence services "tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications." Advocates insist the monitoring would be directed at suspected terrorists, but critics don't buy it. A nine-person committee set up to oversee the surveillance would have only an advisory role and could not overrule the prime minister. The measure "shows a number of tactics that seem cribbed from the NSA, including bulk collection of internet metadata, which would allow the government to track French citizens from site to site," notes a post at the Verge. The legislation also allows intelligence services to put microphones in a room or on objects to record conversations, and to use other devices to intercept phone conversations and text messages. The French debate follows the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices, and "many in the Socialist Party who would normally have spoken out against the new powers have instead kept quiet," observes the BBC. "In the wake of the January attacks, there is little political mileage in raising doubts about the intelligence services." (In the US, things seem to be moving in the opposite direction.)