In the midst of the media uproar over drug trafficking, a law on “drug trafficking” is passing through Parliament. In reality, this text does not only apply to the sale of narcotics and leads to a heavy reinforcement of the surveillance capacities of the intelligence and judicial police. It is one of the most repressive and dangerous texts of recent years. This law could notably give even more powers to repress activism.
This bill was adopted unanimously in the Senate, with the support of the Socialists, the Ecologists and the Communists, and will now be discussed in the National Assembly. La Quadrature du Net is calling for urgent mobilization to raise awareness of the dangers of this text and to push left-wing parties to reject it.
On this page, you will find a set of resources and tools to help you understand this law and convince your elected representatives to mobilize:
- The so-called “Drug Trafficking” law undermines the protection of encrypted messaging services (such as Signal or WhatsApp) by requiring the implementation of backdoors for the police and intelligence services.
- By modifying the legal regime for organized crime, applicable in other cases, this law does not only apply to drug trafficking. It can even be used to surveil activists.
- The safe-deposit box, a provision of the law, makes secret the documents in a file detailing the use of surveillance techniques during an investigation. This violates the right to defend oneself and prevents the public from knowing the extent of the surveillance capabilities of the judicial police.
- The text provides for authorizing the police to remotely activate the microphones and cameras of fixed and mobile connected devices (computers, telephones, etc.) to spy on individuals.
- It extends the authorization to use “black boxes”, a technique for analyzing data from all our communications and exchanges on the Internet for the purpose of “fighting delinquency and organized crime”.
- The police will be able to tighten its policy of censoring Internet content by extending it to publications related to the use and sale of drugs. The risks of abuse of freedom of expression are therefore amplified.
Summary of the law in video
Piphone: choose which MP to call
Some progressive elected representatives have bought into this narrative and this dangerous security escalation. In the Senate, the Green, Communist and Socialist groups voted in favor of this text. We believe that they must be made to face their responsibility by denouncing the dangers of this law. With our tool, you can contact them directly to send them the arguments and resources shared on this page. It is also possible to try to convince the deputies of Together for the Republic and Modem to vote against the most dangerous measures of this bill.
You can call them all week and if possible on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, when they are not in the chamber. You will probably have an assistant on the phone and that’s okay! Feel free to talk to them, and then ask them to relay your opinion to their MP.
Thank you to everyone who is putting their energy into opposing this umpteenth security crackdown, and well done to those who had the courage to contact their MPs! <3
In detail: what does the proposed law provide for?
– Amendment of the organized crime regime
This law significantly strengthens the organized crime regime, which does not only concern drug trafficking. This legal framework was created twenty years ago to target, in theory, mafia networks by providing specific rules that derogate from common law. In particular, they allow the police to use surveillance techniques that are much broader and more intrusive than normal (wiretapping, IMSI-catchers, bugging, data capture, etc.). The scope of the offenses covered by the organized crime regime is defined in a list of the code of criminal procedure, which has grown steadily over the years, affecting more people and situations. In particular, it covers criminal association and a number of offenses and crimes committed by “organized gangs”, these classifications being increasingly used to prosecute activists. This was particularly the case during the movement of the pursue an activist fighting against the construction of administrative detention centers.
To legitimize the extension of supposedly limited measures, the government and parliamentarians are using sensationalist discourse to address the issue of drug trafficking, which is not new and has known other solutions than the “all-repressive” approach. This is not insignificant. By giving the fight against drug trafficking an exceptional dimension, they are trying to justify the need to resort to extraordinary means that are extremely detrimental to our freedoms. In this respect, they are following the legislative pattern used in recent years in the fight against terrorism, which has allowed for the establishment of very significant derogations from the functioning of the institutions that have gone far beyond terrorism.
– Secret police surveillance
The law prevents people from knowing how they are being monitored, which is an unprecedented and very serious attack on the founding principles of the French judicial system, which are the right to defend oneself and the principle of adversarial proceedings. Thus a measure known as the “safe file” or “separate report” would make it possible to separate from the criminal file the reports related to the implementation of surveillance techniques. These reports will only be accessible to investigators under the control of the prosecutor or the investigating judge, preventing lawyers and the persons concerned from reading and discussing them and thus from detecting potential illegalities. This will also deprive the public of the opportunity to know the extent of the surveillance capabilities of the judicial police and will facilitate abuses in the use of highly intrusive techniques, such as spyware or the compromising of devices.
The senators amended the text to destroy the confidentiality of encrypted messaging services such as Signal or WhatsApp. The law stipulates that communication services are obliged to introduce access – a “backdoor” – for the benefit of the police and intelligence services, under penalty of heavy sanctions. This would create an unprecedented breach in end-to-end encryption technology, exploitable by both states and malicious actors. Such a measure is extremely dangerous. As reiterated by numerous institutions, including ANSSI and the European Data Protection Board has been warning that this would weaken the level of protection for all communications and threaten the confidentiality of all our exchanges. For years, we have been defending the right to encryption. You can read our position from 2017 here.
– Remote activation of connected objects
This law provides for a new escalation in surveillance by continuing the legalization of spyware (such as NSO-Pegasus or Paragon). It thus authorizes the police to remotely activate the microphones and cameras of fixed and mobile connected devices, such as computers or telephones, to spy on people. This technique relies on compromising computer systems by using flaws in connected devices. Proposed by Eric Dupont-Moretti in 2023 in a law on judicial reform, this surveillance measure was partially censored by the Constitutional Council. It is reproduced here with slight modifications, while the urgency would be to ban this type of surveillance, as it poses dangers to democratic balances and individual freedoms.
– Expansion of intelligence powers and black boxes
Intelligence services would also see their powers strengthened with this law. On the one hand, the exchange of information between so-called “second circle” services (for which intelligence is only part of their mission, particularly within the police and national gendarmerie) is in principle very limited. It would be facilitated here by the removal of the need for authorization, and this well beyond the sole perimeter of drug trafficking. On the other hand, the law broadens the scope of application of the “black boxes” to the purpose of “fighting delinquency and organized crime.” This intelligence technique analyzes the data of all our communications and data retrieved from the internet via algorithms under the pretext of “detecting” new suspects. Since their creation in 2015, – Internet censorship
The law will allow the police – via the Pharos service – to censor any content on the internet that it considers illegal in connection with an offense relating to drug trafficking. These are very broad prerogatives that are in addition to an already very significant capacity for administrative censorship. This possibility of requiring the withdrawal of publications without the intervention of a judge had initially been authorized for child criminal content before being extended to terrorism. This desire to lock down the internet can only lead to abuse in view of the volume of content concerned and the extra-judicial framework of this censorship, without really having an impact on the social problem of drug use, which is based on many other factors. So far, we have mentioned the most worrying measures, but unfortunately this law contains many other security extensions applying to “organized crime”, which, as we know, concerns many more situations than drug trafficking: IMSI-catchers in private places, the power of the prefect to ban people from “appearing” in a place, the use of drones in prisons, compulsory cameras in ports, a new broad and poorly defined offense of “participation in a criminal organization”…– And other measures