Article 7 of the law on the Olympic Games was adopted Thursday, March 23 by the Assembly, formalizing the formal entry of algorithmic video surveillance (VSA) into French law, until December 2024. In the shadow of the tumult of the pension reform, and thanks to a procedure as usual extremely fast, the government has managed to get one of the most dangerous technologies ever deployed accepted. To do this, he used strategies, lies and fictitious accounts, so that the technical functioning of these tools and their political and legal consequences in terms of mass surveillance were never seriously and concretely discussed. Thanks to a totally disinvested majority and the total support of the far right, the VSA was therefore able to be legalized on the basis of lies that undermine the democratic game a little more and more.
- The lie of biometrics : the government repeated and enshrined in law that VSA does not fall under biometric surveillance. It is totally false. This technology permanently identifies, analyzes and classifies bodies, physical attributes, gestures, silhouettes, gaits, which are unquestionably biometric data. We have never stopped explaining it (see our note and our video), repeating it to the rapporteurs of the Senate and the Assembly as well as to the deputies, as have also done 38 international organizations and around forty MEPs who recently challenged the government. But he continued to sink into this technical and legal lie. France is thus once once more violating European Union law and establishing its position as European surveillance champion.
- The usefulness lie: the government has used the Olympic Games as a pretext to achieve more quickly the objective, set for years, of legalizing these technologies, thereby following the “tradition”, observed everywhere else and consisting in exploiting in a very opportunistic way the international mega-events. The government has managed to make people believe in a necessity, fabricated from scratch, to “identify suspicious packages” or “prevent crowd movements”. These events have suddenly become the new priority of the Ministry of the Interior and of the zealous deputies, who have never ceased to summarize the security of the Olympics in these situations, rarely identified as priorities in normal times, and whose resolution we demonstrate here. depends more on human skill than on technology. Thus, VSA was accepted solely on the basis of an ingrained myth that technology magically provides security, without any evaluation or demonstration of the usefulness or proportionality of these very opaque technologies having ever been honestly carried out.
- The technical lie: the main application of the VSA consists in identifying behaviors that the police will have previously defined as “suspicious”. Arbitrary and inherently dangerousthe operation of these algorithms has never been explained by the government: and for good reason, it is probably not understood by the majority of decision-makers… Inexcusable incompetence or assumed desire to drown the fish, in any case, this has brought parliamentary debates to an extremely low level, which is not commensurate with the extremely serious issues raised by these biometric technologies. Thanks to the help of Renaissance reporters Guillaume Vuilletet and Sacha Houlié (replacing him) and a few deputies, it was the rhetoric of minimization drawn from the sales pitches of the VSA companies, the lies and technical nonsense that predominated. What emerges is Parliament’s patent inability to discuss technical issues, but above all the legitimate fear that society must have for the future, given the incompetence of representatives to grasp the outlines and dangers of next emerging technologies.
At a time when images of police violence flood the screens, when the police, armed with truncheons, provide following-sales service for measures that are as unpopular as possible, the increase in police surveillance is part of a political strategy aimed at stifling any dispute.
We must denounce these maneuvers allowing the State to divert the reality of the surveillance prerogatives that it assumes. Particularly in a context where words are deliberately deviated from their meaning, where people try to convince us that “surveillance is protection”, that “security is freedom”, and that “democracy is is the passage in force”. It is necessary to make visible, to counter this false democratic game, and to relentlessly question the exorbitant powers attributed to the French police apparatus. It is not necessary to evoke a “Chinese-style” dystopia to take stock of the dangers. It is better to look at French history and the current political climate, to measure and understand the security rush that has been visible for twenty years: ever more cameras, surveillance and files, in a growing depoliticization of social issues, and a loss of guidelines for policy makers. Thus, the debates on the JO law have mainly shone by the loss of political compass of the leaders who seem hermetic to any questioning on these subjects.
This first legalization of automated video surveillance is a stage victory for French security industries. They who have been asking for years to be able to test their algorithms on populations, to perfect them and sell them internationally, here they are served. Soon Thales, XXII, Two-I and Neuroo will be able to sell their biometric software to other states, just as Idemia sold its facial recognition technology to China. Startup XXII didn’t even wait for the law to be passed to announce with fanfare that she had raised 22 million euros to become, in her words, “the European leader” of the VSA.
On the side of the institutions supposed to preserve freedoms, such as the CNIL, there is a total resignation. Established in 1978, the CNIL is an institution endowed with real countervailing capacities to measure state surveillance inclinations. in order to preserve the economic interests of the industry despite any consideration for collective rights and freedoms.
This first legalization of automated video surveillance will necessarily pave the way for all other biometric surveillance technologies: algorithmic audio surveillance, facial recognition, biometric tracking of people a posteriori…
We are not going to give up the fight, we will continue to denounce the lies of the government, we will be present as soon as the first experiment is implemented to document the inevitable abuses to which these technologies lead. We will look for ways to challenge them in court, and we will fight to ensure that this experimentation does not lead, as is unfortunately likely, to their perpetuation.
And we will continue to refuse these technologies and the Technopolice they embody, in particular by fighting at European level to obtain their ban.
So if you want to help us in this fight, keep an eye on what we can launch in the coming months, and if you can donate!
