Taking France as a case study, this article reflects on the ongoing legalisation strategies pursued by liberal states as they seek to secure and expand the Internet surveillance programs of their domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. Following the path to legalisation prior and after the Snowden disclosures of 2013, the article shows how post-Snowden controversies helped mobilise advocacy groups against the extra judicial surveillance of Internet communications, a policy area which had hitherto been overlooked by French human rights groups. It also points to the dilemma that post-Snowden contention created for governments. On the one hand, the disclosures helped document the growing gap between the existing legal framework and actual surveillance practices, exposing them to litigation and thereby reinforcing the rationale for legalisation. On the other hand, they made such a legislative reform politically risky and unpredictable. In France, policy-makers navigated these constraints through a cautious mix of silence, denials, and securitisation. After the Paris attacks of January 2015 and a hasty deliberation in Parliament, the Intelligence Act was passed, making it the most extensive piece of legislation ever adopted in France to regulate secret state surveillance. The article concludes by pointing to the paradoxical effect of post-Snowden contention: French law now provides for clear rules authorising large-scale surveillance, to a degree of detail that was hard to imagine just a few years ago.

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Hackers contre États : subversion, répression et résistance dans l'espace public numérique L'article utilise le concept de « citoyenneté insurrectionnelle » pour analyser les usages militants d'Internet qui subvertissent les règles de droit encadrant la liberté d'expression et l'espace public démocratique. Il examine ensuite les politiques répressives des États visant à contrer ces illégalismes, ainsi que les stratégies de contournement et de résistance mises en oeuvre par les militants. À partir de trois exemples -Copwatch (surveillance citoyenne de la police), WikiLeaks (fuite de documents confidentiels) et The Pirate Bay (plateforme peer-topeer de partage d'oeuvres culturelles) -, l'article montre comment la cyberculture conduit à l'émergence d'un nouveau mouvement de défense des droits humains visant à légaliser des pratiques militantes « para-légales » et à transformer le rapport de force entre la société civile et l'État dans l'espace public numérique.

While it is too early to provide a definitive analysis of the impact that the covid-19 health crisis will have on digital state surveillance, this article aims to provide a first assessment. It starts by situating states’ response to the crisis in the longer history of epidemics and their connections to what philosopher Michel Foucault called “regimes of power.” By surveying various surveillance discourses and practices in countries like France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States or Israel in the Spring of 2020, the article identifies three key trends magnified by the crisis, namely, the crystallisation of new public-private assemblages in the management of health data, a shift towards health-based justification regimes for legitimising controversial surveillance and urban policing technologies, as well as mounting human rights threats and oversight failures in a context marked by a “state of health emergency”.

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