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mendax writes:

Liberté, égalité, fraternité? Non! At least no "liberté" if the lower house of the French parliament has anything to do with it. The New York Times is reporting:

The lower house of the French Parliament overwhelmingly approved a sweeping intelligence bill that, if it passes in the upper house, would give the government broad surveillance powers with little judicial oversight.

The measure, which must still pass the Senate, was a strong reaction to the security threat vividly displayed by the January terrorist attacks in and around Paris, including at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher grocery that left 17 people dead.

The bill would give French intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data from Internet communications, and to tap cellphones and capture text messages. It would force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through subscribers' communications.

More coverage of "France's Patriot Act": BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Washington Post, France 24, and TechCrunch.