Le Prisme

The U.S. PRISM story turned out to be utterly gripping this weekend, even though it managed to completely eclipse the potentially far more terrifying earlier report on the NSA's regular collection of 'metadata' on millions of U.S. calls. (The Obama administration defended the practice of collecting telephone records, while Verizon declined to comment.)

There were some ripples in Europe, as our coverage indicated, with lawmakers in UK, Germany and Switzerland calling for more information - though in France the reaction was pretty muted.

So why was the weekend news in France focused on national stories and the French Open rather than a potential threat to privacy that could theoretically stretch to France if information on French citizens was being collected by PRISM?

Not sure. But what is interesting is that France has already done a lot of soul-searching about surveillance and cybersnooping over the past few years - and seemingly come to terms with it.

Under previous president Nicolas Sarkozy came "Hadopi", the agency that allowed music and movie rights holders to monitor peer-to-peer sharing and meted out punishments to those who were illegally downloading content. Also under Sarkozy came "Loppsi 2", a law that The Register painted as worse than Australia in the "Big Brother stakes". Though France's constitutional court later scrapped a few of its measures, the law gives the authorities greater powers to combat cybercrime and terrorism - by planting spyware to monitor those suspected of serious crimes, for example, albeit only with a judge's approval. Rights groups were especially angry over the law's allowing of filtering, censorship and blocking of offensive websites without court approval - right now it only concerns sites displaying child pornography but the advocacy groups said there was a risk it might broaden.

Now, under Francois Hollande, France is preparing its own electronic surveillance data-gathering platform, called PNIJ. (Internal documents have been leaked by blogs, while the broad outline has been openly confirmed by police unions among others.) Now I don't know *at all* what PRISM is for sure, given the disparity between the Powerpoint presentations given by the Washington Post and the Guardian and the official statements by the tech companies and the U.S. intelligence chief, but if we take the authorities at face value and imagine that it is a quicker, easier but still legal way for the authorities to request and gather telecommunications data on a court-approved basis, then, well, that's pretty much what the PNIJ seems to be according to the leaked documents. The rest is up to the laws regarding electronic surveillance, which are obviously different in both countries.

There hasn't been much outrage at all over PNIJ in France, apart from those police staff who say they aren't equipped to deal with it and some blogs and other reports that warn it might be risky to centralise private data in this way.

So while things may change, for now I can understand why there might not be an instinctive rush by France to find out exactly what kind of snooping has been going on in the U.S., largely because getting to grips with the surveillance going on in France has been controversial enough for a good few years now.