The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, on October 19, 2020, in Paris. LUDOVIC MARIN / AFP
A draft law aimed at “perpetuating” measures contained in the anti-terrorism law of 2017 and the intelligence law of 2015 will be presented Wednesday 28 April in the council of ministers. “At the request of the President of the Republic and the prime minister, I will present on Wednesday a bill devoted to intelligence and the fight against terrorism,” said interior minister Gérald Darmanin in an interview with the Sunday Newspaper dated April 25.
The text, which will be filed five days after the deadly attack at the police station in Rambouillet, Yvelines, has been in preparation for several weeks.
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” The threat remains strong : since 2017 we have suffered fourteen attacks causing the death of twenty-five people “, recalled Mr. Darmanin, while stressing that thirty-six terrorist attacks had been foiled in the same period, the last of which in Béziers, at the beginning of April.
Gérard Collomb’s law on internal security and the fight against terrorism (known as the “SILT” law) was adopted in October 2017 to take over the state of emergency put in place following the November 2015 attacks.
Perpetuating the use of algorithms
This text made it possible to experiment for three years in the common law measures to combat terrorism – much disputed by defenders of civil liberties –, such as “home visits” (ex-administrative searches), individual control measures (Micas), the establishment of security perimeters and the closure of places of worship. These controversial measures were extended in December 2020 by Parliament until July 31, 2021, the deadline for the adoption of the new bill.
Among the changes foreseen by the future text, the extension “up to two years”, compared to one year currently, of the period during which persons convicted of terrorism can be the subject of measures of administrative constraints after their release from prison, the Minister of the Interior announced to the JDD.
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Moreover, ” the text plans to update and perpetuate the use of algorithms, that is to say the automated processing of connection data, by the DGSI [Directorate General of Internal Security]”, confirmed Mr. Darmanin. This technique, contained in the 2015 law, is the subject of a review clause (committing the executive to review the legislative provisions after a period of experimentation). It allows the analysis of communications exchanged within an operator’s network to detect threats.
When asked about the risk of infringement of individual freedoms, Mr. Darmanin asked to stop with ” naivety “. “All large companies use algorithms. And there would be only the state that could not use them ? “he retorted.
The national coordinator of intelligence and the fight against terrorism, Laurent Nuñez, stressed Saturday on BFM-TV ” the importance of this technique with increasingly isolated individuals whose only traces are digital traces “, like the author of the Rambouillet terrorist attack.
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