Winston Maxwell writes:
Adopted by Parliament in June 2015, France’s new surveillance law was ratified by the President on July 24, 2015 and published in France’s Official Journal on July 26, 2015. France’s Constitutional Court (“Court”) reviewed the law prior to its ratification and issued an opinion on July 23, 2015 requiring deletion of certain measures that the Court felt were incompatible with constitutional principles. However a number of observers were surprised that the Court validated a provision of the law allowing intelligence agencies to deploy algorithms to analyze traffic and log data to detect potential terrorist threats. To some lawyers, analyzing the traffic and log data of the entire population of France violates the proportionality principle set forth in the European Court of Justice’s Digital Rights Ireland decision.
Read more on HoganLovells Chronicle of Data Protection.