In the wake of last Friday's attacks in Paris, France is bringing in new legislation extending the country's temporary state of emergency to three months. The new laws also grant the authorities new powers to carry out searches of seized devices and to block websites.

Under the legislation, police searches of digital equipment are no longer limited to the device itself. Instead, they may also extend to include any data that is "accessible from the initial system or available for the initial system," as the French digital rights site La Quadrature du Net explains. In practice this means police may use seized devices in order to search for "any type of information on any type of electronic device of any French resident and especially any information available via usernames, passwords collected during a police search, any content stored online."

The state of emergency legislation also extends measures put in place in November 2014 that allow France's Minister of the Interior to block any website "promoting terrorism or inciting terrorist acts." Previously, the Minister was only able to force sites to be blocked after a delay of 24 hours; now this happens immediately.

An amendment that would've made it illegal to merely visit a site connected with terrorism was rejected. Currently, it is an offence if the visits are habitual and linked with preparations for concrete acts of terrorism. However, the French prime minister said that legislators will soon be discussing the matter again, suggesting that his government has plans to bring in a law along these lines.

Finally, La Quadrature du Net points out a worrying vagueness in a section of the new law dealing with powers to dissolve groups or associations that "take part in committing acts that seriously endanger the public order or whose activities facilitate or encourage committing such acts." For example, this could include "many associations promoting the use of encryption technologies, which are indeed used by criminals but also mainly by many innocent citizens."

The fear is that by rushing through this legislation while emotions are understandably running high, the French government will pass measures with unforeseen and harmful consequences.