Under a"left wing" administration, the whole french population will be under state surveillance. Thanks to the new "Secure Electronic Titles" (TES) system, 60 million people will have all their personal information collected and recorded with any knowledge of who will use them and for what purpose.
Claiming to fight to defeat terrorism, the government will need a record of our:
- Names
- ID Card numbers
- Eye colors
- Fingerprints
- Digital signature
- Physical address
- Email addresses
After the law on surveillance which allows indiscriminate warrantless recording of our communications and web browsing, after widening the scope of "apology of terror" to clamp down on freedom of expression, after the year long state of emergency and its 3600+ useless police raids and countless arbitrary arrests, after declaring withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights, after waging a war on encryption of private conversations, after reforming the criminal proceeding code in order to increase powers of the prosecutor, the decision to have an e-file on everything single person in France without any debate in parliament is the final nail in our civil liberties coffin.
Regardless of the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty's (CNIL) "reserves", the government went ahead with its project. When combined with the militarization of the police while lowering the requirements to open fire and reducing the chances of being held accountable, one can only wonder what is this government is preparing for. This increased surveillance and accumulated powers for the state while citizens' space for debate and dissent is shrinking does not mean good news for the rule of law.
There is no protecting "democracy" nor the "rule of law" by acting outside of both of them and using "exceptional" powers. Nothing is more permanent than a temporary loss of freedom and I am afraid France is bound to become a dictatorship while proclaiming as always to be the home of human rights. Adminstrations have come and gone yet the trend towards further loss of civil liberties has never been reversed. So much so that in March already, Paris' Chair of the Bar association declared that France could veer to a dictatorship withi a week; that was before the series of measures mentionned above.
Our collective silence is making the worse possible. Welcome to France. We are in 2016 and my country is officially a police state.