'Spooks' the movie opens today.

Based on the massively successful television spy series, the film's actual title is 'The Greater Good'.

It's an apt phrase, being one that essentially captures what so much intelligence and espionage work is meant to be about.

No doubt the French government believes it is working for the greater good of its country when this week it passed what amounts to a landmark and sweeping intelligence bill through the country's lower house of parliament.

The bill now goes to the Senate, where it will almost certainly be rubber stamped, having been fast tracked as a result of the terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January.

These same attacks starkly revealed how lacking the French security services were in terms of the resources needed to track potential terrorists within the country.

The proposed new measures would give the intelligence services the right to gather virtually unlimited data, checking emails and bugging rooms, cars or objects as well as install so-called International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) catchers, a device used to intercept communications.

Even more significantly the steps will empower security services to force Internet companies to provide access to subscriber communications.

This would also enable intelligence officers to insist that providers install "black boxes" to monitor Internet traffic on a suspect's computer.

These devices will use algorithms to determine if the suspect is likely to become a terrorist, according to their "signature behaviour". This same algorithm formula will of course remain classified.

If all of this has a familiar ring it's because we have been here before. Ever since US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden lifted the lid on mass surveillance undertaken by western intelligence services, the extent of such practices has become more public and generated substantial controversy in the process.

The latest French moves are no exception. Before taking stock of the political and human rights fallout from the intelligence bill however, it's worth remembering how such surveillance powers are nothing new.

Only the most naive would think that the security services of any country even without legal clearance would decline from using such methods.

Indeed the French authorities themselves in the throes of the current controversy freely admit that unauthorised wire-tapping and the use of IMSI-catchers is not uncommon.

As Eric Maurice rightly points in the online EUobserver, in effect all the new bill does is to legalise the so-called "grey zone" of illegal yet admitted practices. Backers of the new of course law argue that it can only do good by bringing the practice under control. But this in turn only begs the question: Why wasn't it before?

Now of course a whole fresh range of concerns have been raised over powers that will be much more far ranging.

For critics, civil liberties and human rights opponents of the measures, a number of issues immediately spring to mind. The first is the sheer quantity of data collected.

The massive volume they say will inevitably throw up what has been called 'false positives' like for example an academic doing terrorism research as opposed to a real life terrorist suspect and genuine threat.

"Journalists, judges, politicians and people who have unwittingly come into contact with alleged suspects could be subject to invasive surveillance," says Gauri van Gulik, Amnesty International's deputy director for Europe summing up the dangers of uncontrolled use.

Then there is the thorny issue of what will happen to all this accumulated data which critics say the bill makes no mention of. Will it be secure and could it conceivably fall in to the wrong hands or be misused?

"The government is telling us they won't store the data and that it will remain anonymous, but how do we know that? " asks Philippe Aigrain, a computer scientist and a member of France's parliamentary commission on digital matters.

Civil liberties activists too are up in arms insisting that the measures are not aimed solely at the prevention of terrorism but will also be used for foreign policy as well as economic and scientific interests. In making their case they point to what they say are serious parallels with US Patriot Act passed a month after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"We're talking about a surveillance program that goes way beyond counterterrorism but is being sold in the context of the trauma of a terrorist attack and justifies extraordinary means and procedures," says Frédérick Douzet, a professor at University of Paris 8's French Institute of Geopolitics and an expert on cybersecurity.

"The way it is being sold is very comparable."

Yet despite all this clamour a poll published last month showed that nearly two-thirds of French people were in favour of restricting freedoms in the name of fighting extremism.

there is certainly no doubt that with the confluence of new technologies, virtual social networks and French communities in which many Muslims feel alienated with some vulnerable to radicalisation the intelligence services are facing unprecedented challenges. There is no doubt that the authorities in France and other European countries are struggling to keep up with the hundreds of French citizens who travel to and from battlefields in Iraq and Syria to wage jihad. Nevertheless moving from targeted surveillance to mass surveillance some would say wholesale snooping remains a concern within the French judiciary