Cybercustoms officers should now have a little more elbow room to take control of the servers of the defendants. The Senate must indeed approve this Tuesday, May 30 a bill strengthening the powers of customs and its specialized unit on digital, Cyberdouane, a text which will then be transmitted to the National Assembly.
Article 10 of this text of the law thus provides for allowing cybercustoms officers to freeze data stored on remote servers in the context of a home visit. In the state of the text, the specialized agents of the National Directorate of Intelligence and Customs Investigations will be able to modify server passwords in order to prevent their access by defendants, thus avoiding the risk of loss of evidence.
Flexibility
Concretely, explains the government in the impact study, it is for customs officers to save time and overcome technical difficulties, such as poor quality of the radio network or quite simply the absence of internet access. . As the report by Senator Albéric de Montgolfier points out, customs officers are faced with “a proliferation of IT tools for storing data”, for example on the cloud, making downloading operations “particularly tedious and technically delicate”.
The senators approved this extension of the prerogatives of customs officers, while limiting the time for downloading frozen data to 30 days. They also clarified the text by recalling that the scope of the data that can be downloaded is limited to those covered by the offense sought.
The previous French Deep Web
However, this kind of data freezing is nothing new for customs officers. As the bill’s impact study specifies, this is, for example, what happened in 2019 during the dismantling of the French Deep Web black market. With the agreement of the judicial authority, the customs officers had then modified the passwords of a server in order to prevent the creation of a mirror server or the withdrawal of the database.
The judicial service in charge of the investigation was then able to download the data later, which would have been “impossible in the time of the home visit”. While at the same time keeping the servers inactive and indicating on the cover pages that they had been seized by the authorities.