PARIS — At a moment when American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11, the lower house of the French Parliament took a long stride in the opposite direction Tuesday, overwhelmingly approving a bill that could give authorities their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight.
The bill, in the works since last year, now goes to the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, having been given new impetus in reaction to the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January, including at the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher grocery, that left 17 people dead.
As the authorities struggle to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who are cycling to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad — often lured over the Internet — the new steps would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.
The provisions, as currently outlined, would allow them to tap cellphones, read emails and force Internet providers to comply with government requests to sift through virtually all of their subscribers’ communications.
Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is the bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.
The intelligence services could also request a right to put tiny microphones in a room or on objects such as cars or in computers or place antennas to capture telephone conversations or mechanisms that capture text messages. Both French citizens and foreigners could be tapped.
“The last intelligence law was done in 1991, when there were neither cellphones nor Internet,” said Manuel Valls, the prime minister, who took the unusual step early last month of personally presenting the bill to the National Assembly and defending the measures, which are already facing gathering opposition from concerned lawyers, Internet companies and human rights groups.
Indeed, the move by the lower house of Parliament underscored the fervent debate going on across Europe over how best to balance civil liberties and privacy rights against mounting threats to security in an age of rising extremism and global interconnectivity.
The confluence of new technologies, virtual social networks and alienated Muslims has made it all the easier for militant groups like the Islamic State to recruit young Europeans for their cause of establishing a new caliphate in the Middle East — and, potentially, of striking at European adversaries at home.
Last month, virtually by a fluke, the French authorities uncovered an apparent plot to attack at least one church near Paris by a gunman who appeared to have been encouraged solely over the Internet by handlers in Syria, without ever having gone there to enlist in jihad.
The growth of global communication, however, has also encouraged governments toward expansive and sometimes unchecked surveillance powers, as the leaks from the National Security Agency’s files by a former contractor, Edward J. Snowden, revealed in 2013.
Even as rising security threats have pushed some European governments to expand their intelligence gathering, elsewhere, like in Germany, the Snowden revelations continue to generate pressures to rein in government surveillance.
Despite the breadth of the provisions in the French bill, Mr. Valls promised that the French law would be “targeted,” and insisted its main focus was to protect French citizens from terrorism.
“The means of surveillance for anticipating, detecting and prevention of attacks will be strictly limited,” he promised.
But opponents, including one of France’s leading judges dealing with terrorism cases, Marc Trévidic, say that the law’s text contradicts the prime minister’s assurances.
“It is a state lie,” said Pierre-Olivier Sur, the head of the Paris bar association. “This project was presented to us as a way to protect France against terrorism, and if that were the case, I would back it,” he said.
“But it is being done to put in place a sort of Patriot Act concerning the activities of each and everyone,” he said, referring to the American legislation that among other things authorized extensive electronic surveillance as a way to intercept terrorist activity.
Mr. Sur said that he and others worried that the measure could be used to monitor any behavior the government viewed as potentially disruptive.
The editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo — a victim of the kinds of attack the measure is presumably meant to thwart — also criticized it. “I think that opportunistic laws are always bad laws,” the editor in chief, Gérard Biard, said in an interview at The New York Times Editorial Board.
“I understand the spirit of this law,” he said. “But I think we already have a lot of laws, and with these laws, if they’re used correctly, you can fight and you can fight terrorism. So I understand the government, you have to do something. The easiest thing to do is to invoke a law. But maybe it’s a mistake, because if this law is not correct, if this law is not fair, it’s not the right answer.”
In the current text of the proposed law it states that the intelligence services can propose surveillance to protect “national independence, the integrity of French territory and national defense” and to “prevent terrorism.”
It also can be used to “prevent attacks on the republican form of institutions,” and to fight organized crime.
French judges and lawyers also site the need for oversight in their criticisms of the law. Mr. Trévidic, the terrorism judge, has gone on national television and described the law as “dangerous” because it lacks any routine judicial review.
The new law would create a 13-member National Commission to Control Intelligence Techniques, which would be made up of six magistrates from the Council of State and the Court of Appeals, three representatives of the National Assembly and three senators from the upper house of the French Parliament and a technical expert.
Any requests to initiate surveillance would have to go through the commission. However, if the commission recommended not to set up the monitoring, it could be overridden by the prime minister.
While in theory the prime minister would act independently, it is likely to be difficult for him or her to oppose the intelligence services because they would be most likely to be supplying the information about possible terrorist or criminal targets.
The only judicial oversight is a provision that allows the commission to lodge a complaint with the Council of State, but lawyers are dubious that they could be convened on a routine basis. The Council of State functions as a legal adviser to the executive branch of government and a supreme court for matters of administrative law.
As for metadata, it would be electronically sorted and then only if the sites visited or searches carried out suggested suspicious behavior as defined by the intelligence services would it trigger a human review of a person’s emails and Internet browsing.
Protesting the legislation are more than 800 Internet companies, web hosts, software developers, e-commerce firms, and other digital businesses which have mounted a broad based campaign against the legislation under the slogan “Neither Pigeons Nor Spies.” A pigeon in French slang refers to someone who is a patsy.
They warn that “to put massive surveillance on the Internet would sacrifice the advent of the digitalization of France, its jobs and contribution to the French economy.” Some of the companies, which have international clients, are threatening to leave France since they fear their customers will no longer trust the confidentiality of their communications.
The opposition goes farther, and includes human rights groups and civil liberties supporters.
These opponents want more protections in the legislation. As written the legislation creates a “French Big Brother,” they say, referring to the George Orwell novel “1984” in which two lovers’ loyalty to the state is constantly watched and regulated by an all-knowing, all-seeing government.
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