Parliament must reject article 7 of the 2024 Olympic Games law!
Our campaign page against the JO law
This petition is addressed to elected officials (municipal, departmental, regional councillors, deputies, senators). If possible, please send us your signature from your official email address, to ensure that it is really you by writing to petition@technopolice.fr (please specify your mandate – for example “municipal councilor of Paris (75) – and, if applicable, the party to which you are attached). We refuse any signature from the extreme right. The complete list of more than 250 signatories can be found here
Through Article 7 of the 2024 Olympic Games Bill, the government intends to legalize algorithmic video surveillance (VSA). It is thus a question of satisfying the demands of industrialists and certain officials of the Ministry of the Interior to allow, via a simple prefectural authorization, the coupling of artificial intelligence to video surveillance cameras placed in public places or placed on drones. Taking as a pretext the Olympic Games organized in the summer of 2024, article 7 would authorize these technologies of mass surveillance for all “sporting, cultural or recreational” events, ranging from Ligue 1 matches to Christmas markets and music festivals. All in the name of a so-called two-year experiment to end in June 2025, requiring everyone who attends these events to become both guinea pigs and victims of these security algorithms.
What exactly is VSA? This is a type of software that automates the analysis of video surveillance streams to trigger alerts intended for the police or security forces when “suspicious behavior” are spotted. It may, for example, be the fact of remaining static in the public space, of walking against the direction of the crowd, of gathering together in the street or even of having the face covered. These software can also automatically track a person’s journey in a territory using biometric attributes such as height, the fact of being perceived as male or female, or the color of one’s clothes. Tomorrow, it will be enough to cross these technologies with various files to practice massively identification by facial recognition — a feature already offered by many start-ups and manufacturers positioned in this market, such as the Briefcam software, whose software is deployed in more than 200 French municipalities.
If the government instrumentalizes the Olympics by claiming to “experiment” with VSA, it has actually been years that experiments are taking place on French territory, and this in all illegality as the Minister of the Interior himself admitted. The State itself directly financed many of these deployments through the Interministerial Fund for the Prevention of Delinquency, the National Research Agency or the experimental program launched by the Ministry of the Interior for Paris 2024 ( which, for example, led to the testing of facial recognition during the Roland-Garros tournament in 2021).
As to purported guarantees made by the government to civil liberties within the framework of this bill, they appear completely ridiculous with regard to the issues raised by the VSA. Contrary to what its promoters claim, these technologies are not simple “decision-making aid” tools: the adoption of article 7 of the Olympic Games bill would be likened to a real change in scale and nature in population monitoring, installing in our democratic societies forms of social control that are today the prerogative of authoritarian countries like China. This is what the CNIL explains when it writes that article 7 ” does not constitute a simple technological evolution of video devices, but a modification of their nature “, adding that such a deployment, “ even experimental, (…) constitutes a turning point » . The Defender of Rights also warns
It is also particularly shocking to note that, by the very admission of its promoters, this shift towards biometric surveillance of public space is motivated by economic considerations. Under cover of experimentation, the law prepares the trivialization of these technologies while allowing private actors to refine their algorithms before their generalization. When we know that the purchase of a single camera costs a community between €25 and €40,000 (without maintenance or analysis software), it is easy to understand that video surveillance and its algorithmic counterpart constitute an immense financial windfall for industrialists of the sector: 1.6 billion euros in turnover for the year 2020
Aware of the risk that algorithmic video surveillance poses to the democratic life of our societies, number of elected officials around the world have decided to ban its use. In December 2022, following the adoption of a City Council resolution, the city of Montpellier became the first French municipality to ban VSA. It has thus joined the list of municipalities in Europe and the United States which have banned such biometric surveillance on their territory. In response to a petition signed by tens of thousands of citizens across the continent, the European Parliament is also discussing a ban on these technologies.
We, elected representatives of the Republic, in turn refuse the use of automated video surveillance and the project of a surveillance society that it embodies. That is why we call on every parliamentarian to vote in conscience against article 7 of the law relating to the Olympic Games.