(French here). This was quite expected, the government slowly adopted more and more laws to restrict freedom and to watch everyone during the past ten years, this is not the first nor the last law, this is just another step for the next law which will be even worse. The government is even censoring comments on social media about the law when it's not going in their direction (I'm not even joking).
The French democracy has been completely broken for a long time and a few relics from the past are still working now. The times when the country was called "the land of the human rights" are long gone. I see a few people trying to contact their representative but it's already too late, the democracy is gone, forget about it, it will just slow things down a bit but that's all, the politicians in power are too corrupted and the system too broken for that to work.
The best solution now for us now is the technical one, to prevent them to do it. But even that solution is temporary, one day or an other, when they will start to attack random citizens, things will have to change... as the quote is saying, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.".
> The French democracy has been completely broken for a long time
I'm not sure if it's a problem of democracy. Most people don't care. I've been discussing with a few French friends about this, and most them just don't see any problem (after all, "they have nothing to hide").
Reading about the French revolution is a bit of a hobby of mine, but it's really all I know about France. Reading this article is surreal when viewed from that context.
Do they teach schoolchildren about the Comité de salut public or anything?
Basically, our Defense Minister's twitter account posted a quote of Christiane Taubira (the Defense Minister) saying "It is obvious that the methods of retrieval [of data] are potentially endangering private life".
The French democracy has been completely broken for a long time and a few relics from the past are still working now. The times when the country was called "the land of the human rights" are long gone. I see a few people trying to contact their representative but it's already too late, the democracy is gone, forget about it, it will just slow things down a bit but that's all, the politicians in power are too corrupted and the system too broken for that to work.
The best solution now for us now is the technical one, to prevent them to do it. But even that solution is temporary, one day or an other, when they will start to attack random citizens, things will have to change... as the quote is saying, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.".