Some key points from the article, translated...
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It was in a nearly empty senate that around thirty deupties
cast their votes [...] on the installation of "black boxes",
a controversial device designed to monitor internet traffic.
[It was] approved by 25 deupties to 5 following heated debates.
The plan: to force ISPs to "detect, through automated
processing, a suspect succession of connection data" that
appear to match patterns typically used by terrorists. In
practice, this would involve installing a "black box" at ISPs
to monitor traffic. The content of the communications would
not be monitored, but only the metadata: the sender or
receiver of a message, the IP address of a visited site...
[...]
"The black box is the Pandora's box of this draft law," said
socialist Aurélie Filippetti in the senate. "They say that the
masses of data that will flow through it will only contain
metadata. But they contain even more information about the
private lives of our fellow citizens! [...] And there is a
paradox in saying that these data will be anonymous when they
are to be used to identify terrorists".
An accusation that was then defended by the government in the
house, "The automated processing marks out suspect behaviour,
not pre-identified persons," emphasized the Defence Minister,
Jean-Yves Le Drian, "It is after that the services are able to
access the identity of the persons."
[...]
Some deputies also pointed out the "economically damaging"
consequences of these black boxes, such as the ecologist
Isabelle Attard, for whom "French IT companies will see their
foreign clients start to desert them as they lose their trust".
Last week, seven large French hosts made their opposition to the
draft clear, stating that it would push them "into exile" so as
not to lose their clients.
[...]
The government nevertheless eluded the more technical questions
throughout the debate, asked, several times, by a few deputies,
among those was Laure de la Raudière (UMP), "Where are you going
to install your probe on the communication networks?", "How will
you optimize the algorithms?", "Will you use deep packet
inspection?".
Bernard Cazeneuve ended up replying to this last question,
repeated several times by the deputy, "We will not use this
technique at all", a technique that involves the deep inspection
[translation of a translation...] of all passing communications
data.
Several deputies have also demanded a precise list of the type of
metadata collected by the black boxes to be clearly defined.
In vain.
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