France Boosts focus on Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Terrorism as the president comes under pressure to crack down on Islamist separatism and terrorism

French President Emmanuel Macron’s government aims at deploying algorithms and other technologies to web-browse terrorist suspects due to rising tensions over a coalition of retired generals who warned that the country was falling into a civil war.
Why is France on the brim of a civil war?
Prime Minister Jean Castex’s government argues that the attacks are driven by radicalizing parts of France’s Muslim community have been intense by pressures toward terrorism and islamist separatism.
In October, a terrorist attack resulted in the beheading of a middle-school teacher, and on Friday, a terrorist attack on a police station resulted in the deadly stabbing of an executive police officer. On the same day, Marine Le Pen, the head of the anti-immigrant National Rally faction, backed a group of retired generals who wrote a letter in the far-right journal Valeurs Actuelles claiming that the rise of Islamism and other philosophies is driving France toward civil war.
How will France monitor this?
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Jean Castex informed Parliament that the government plans to send a bill requesting permanent authority to order telecommunications providers not only to track telephone information but also to monitor the full URLs of their users’ personal sites in real-time. Government algorithms will warn officials of intelligence when certain conditions, like an internet user browsing a series of sites, are reached.
What is the group of generals saying?
In the letter to Mr Macron, the generals are demanding that what they see as obstacles to French national identity, from the anti-racism movement to Islamism and hordes of suburbs, be eliminated, a reference for the working-class suburbs of the Republic of France that have vast communities of Islam, which the letter objectifies as eradicating French history.
There’s no time for a delay. If not, this increasing instability will be sold tomorrow by civil war, the letter states. On Wednesday, Mr Castex said: “I strongly oppose this initiative against our republican values and against the army’s dignity and obligation. It’s not just the military. These generals are no one except themselves.”
Ms. Le Pen, who lost to Mr. Macron in 2017 and challenged him during his presidential election next year, on Friday, released an open letter of her own in Valeurs Actuelles, praised the generals and invited them to participate in a war she characterized as political and peaceful. The complaints you courageously express cannot stay at the stage of expressing outrage, no matter how powerful they are, Ms. Le Pen writes. The Country’s proposed anti-terrorism and intelligence bill is recommending that, following a period of militant threats in 2015, it could now extend a mostly telephone-based monitoring scheme, including online browsing, to identify suspected jihadists who are not on government radar. The initial monitoring system that started operating in 2017 will expire by the end of July. According to a parliamentary report released last year, the framework has yielded interesting findings, but the nature of the data it gathers, which is mostly focused on telephone data, does not provide investigators with enough relevance and specificity.