Right, France is a totalitarian government, no proof necessary. You cannot fight nonsense with nonsense.
Imagine how many crimes local police could prevent if they did have access? Unlike finding small terrorist cells among tens of millions of people, busting local criminals is very easy if you can spy on their communication.
They could probably save thousands of children from serious abuse. They could definitely save some people from being murdered.
And yet, it's still not worth it because we would be living in a police state, not a free society.
They are calling for mass video surveillance of everyone's encounters with police.
That's because there are serious problems with police accountability. Citizens benefit because bad police (which we hope are a minority) are discouraged from acting poorly, due to pervasive evidence, and the police benefit because there is a clear documented record of What Happened, which helps prevent spurious claims of police misconduct.
It's something that most of the police seem not to want, judging from reactions towards journalists and people with cameras, so it's not the __police__ asking for more surveillance. (Well, I mean, they are, but not in this way.)
"Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens."
Nonsense.
In completely unrelated news, the city of Beauvais voted 67% against the municipal police force carrying weapons. The municipal police retaliated by not tolerating night-time parking anymore, resulting in a significant increase in parking tickets in locations that had been safe for years.
And while the mayor did apologize for this, the municipal police said it was "just doing our job".
http://www.leparisien.fr/beauvais-60000/beauvais-des-pv-pour...
Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.
Which, not coincidentally, is the entire basis for the war on [some] drugs [when used by some people].
"This is a win for everyone"
Except as you pointed out, it's not a win for everyone all the time.
Thanks to a spectacularly complex legal system, we all break plenty of laws each day. If our every action is recorded, then so are those currently inconsequential violations of law, giving whoever controls the panopticon the ability to pick and choose who to prosecute with near impunity.
I have been following a lot of French people on Twitter following the terrorist attacks and I didn't sense from them any caution or worries of giving the govt and security forces a carte blanche with the state of emergency and even for the upcoming constitutional referendum.
They seemed very naive and trust their government blindly to the point of trading their freedom for the illusion of safety and not learning the hard lesson endured by their American peers with the Patriot Act and the ensuing mass surveillance following the 9/11 attacks.