Your last quip seems minor but I personally think it's a huge driver for all this. "Security" is a huge pork barrel for a large number of contractors and equipment vendors. A lot of it is basically snake oil but that doesn't matter. Getting money out of the government piñata is the goal, not actual security.

The legislation was largely to authorize practices that the surveillance community was already engaged in but which were on questionable legal ground because the existing legal framework had not been updated since 1991. They also expanded the ability of the French surveillance community to outsource some of their needs to 3rd parties; eg, require ISPs to store communications rather than the Government intercepting them and storing them.

France was absolutely not starting from scratch on Surveillance at the beginning of May. The bill dropped the need for things like "get a warrant before monitoring all traffic to/from an IP in realtime"; they had that ability long before.

Edit: I would absolutely love someone to explain why this post is being downvoted

you know what's a coincidence though: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/hours-befo...

drills as mass attacks are happening - be it 9/11 , Sandy Hook, London Bombing or others

+ factor in: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/17/serbian-police-...

The passport of a "suicide bomber" escaped the bomb blast and landed into the hands of autorities (conviniently) -- but now Serbian police have proven it to be a fraudulent passport...so how did it get there?