WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, UCL AL #337 - Politics, Paris 2024: The cameras pointed at us (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The organization of major events, such as the Olympic Games or the World Cups,

allows States to deploy security measures and technological surveillance tools
such as video surveillance and facial recognition. ---- Since video surveillance
was legalized in 1995, there has been an explosion in the number of surveillance
cameras, both private and public. Objective : to reduce delinquency, but the
Court of Auditors admits it itself : "no overall correlation has been found
between the existence of video protection devices (sic) and the level of
delinquency committed on the public highway" . This does not prevent the State
from engaging in one-upmanship : increasing the number of cameras, the number of
agents viewing video streams, creating urban surveillance centers, and now
algorithmic video surveillance (VSA).

The argument behind VSA is that there are too many video streams for officers to
detect all suspicious events. The goal is therefore to have these flows analyzed
by algorithms in order to detect abnormal behavior. Presented as an asset in the
fight against terrorism, we note above all that the events detected are rather
minor offenses or obstacles to private property (person running, person lying
down, person writing on a wall, group of people, person or vehicle entering
private property, etc.). It is much more about criminalizing the behavior of
precarious people than a pseudo fight against terrorism. Worse, we let private
companies decide on "suspicious" behavior in the public space.

Mass surveillance, what for?
Even if their effectiveness is debated in France, these tools are already in
operation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) within the framework responsible for
the fight against terrorism, and in pursuit of anti "Arab spring" objectives.
Today, the UAE is showing the world its will to be a global power in
surveillance. Abu Dhabi plays an important role in the development of geospatial
intelligence for military and security purposes.

Among the software for processing large masses of data, there is, based in Abu
Dhabi, a supplier of American intelligence agencies and the French Directorate
General for Internal Security (DGSI). Who can be targeted by Emirati surveillance
? It's hard to answer these questions, but in France, we know very well that
these tools are mainly aimed at large projects : airports, tourist sites,
stadiums, offices, data centers, or urban supervision centers (CSU) which
centralize flows video from the municipal cameras and which make it possible to
guide the targeted interventions of the police.

For example, eliminating traffic problems in a small town like Dugny, on the road
linking Le Bourget airport to the "media village", will be an important issue for
these 2024 Olympics, justifying the deployment of these technologies which claim
to make " smart " cities, more ecological, by means of energy-intensive computer
infrastructures, while marketing functionalities aimed at security.

Target face photographed
In addition, for effective video-verbalization, let's not forget that an operator
of urban supervision centers (CSU) can always activate the facial recognition
functionality: the targeted face will be photographed and then imported into the
search base in order to carry out a "face comparison" on the video feed. In the
event that the police identify the suspicious person, the software allows you to
import a photo from social networks to apply the facial comparison.

This also paves the way for the use of the criminal record processing file (TAJ),
a database of nineteen million files (including nine million photos), during
identity checks to make facial recognition by border police, to target and
repress undocumented people.

It is within the framework of the Olympic Games, via article 7 of the so-called
Olympic law 2, adopted by the Senate on January 31, that the experimentation of
the VSA will be authorized, in order to prevent crowd movements during the Games.
Paris Olympics in 2024.

As an association fighting against censorship and surveillance, La Quadrature du
Net has taken up the subject. Initiator of the Technopolice campaign, she
organized on January 14 at the Flèche d'Or the evening " Security Olympics, the
noose is tightening ", in order to discuss and debate the phenomenon of the
Olympic Games as a surveillance accelerator.

Technopolice and neoliberal urbanization
The evening gave rise to discussions between Matheus Viegas Ferrari, doctoral
student in anthropology and international relations, the Saccage 2024 collective
and Marianna Kontos, architect-urban planner. These exchanges, illustrated by the
experience of the Rio Olympics and the current situation in Seine-Saint-Denis,
highlighted the tool that the Olympics were as a pretext for the deployment of a
repressive legal arsenal and forced neoliberal urbanization in popular neighborhoods.

On the fight side, La Quadrature led a workshop on requests from the Commission
for Access to Administrative Documents (Cada), a tool they use to obtain
information on technopolice projects planned by the municipalities. Getting
informed and shedding light on these projects often makes it possible to mobilize
locally and force municipalities to abandon them. Let us take advantage of the
tools that the state puts at our disposal to attack it.

Although La Quadrature mainly fights against Article 7, the bill aims to shed
light on a number of points that remained unresolved with the first Olympic law,
such as the criminalization of certain behaviors that will allow the repression
of environmental activists.

The law will also grant more powers to private security agents : faced with the
lack of around 20,000 agents, there will be a need for many private agents, and
an incentive for the unemployed in Île-de-France to filling the gap is not to be
excluded.

This bill will tip France ever further into a society of police surveillance. We
will have to publicly demand the prohibition of these surveillance devices and
total analysis of our behavior in the public space.

Muhsin (UCL Paris Northeast) and Yannick

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Paris-2024-Les-cameras-braquees-sur-nous
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