Examined from Monday, March 20 at the end of the day in the National Assembly, the bill “relating to the Olympic and Paralympic Games of 2024 and laying down various other provisions” should see its article 7 fiercely discussed. It provides for the legalization, for experimental purposes, of automated video surveillance until the end of 2024. An adjustment of the legislative framework long desired by manufacturers in the sector but which is causing associations for the defense of civil liberties, left-wing MEPs and even, more recently, MEPs.
Algorithmic (VSA) or automated video surveillance technologies, sometimes referred to as “intelligent video surveillance” by industry professionals, are all based on the same principle: using algorithms to analyze large quantities of video surveillance images in order to make emerge different information.
“Many municipalities have installed a lot of CCTV cameras, explains an employee of a company in the sector. But they are unable to process and monitor these video streams in real time. What we sell them is a solution to this problem. » Accelerated viewing of long hours of images, real-time alert system in the event of the presence of individuals or vehicles on a given perimeter, detection of gatherings of individuals or raiding, identification of suspicious behavior… the possibilities are many.
On the different principle of facial recognition, the VSA nevertheless offers identification tools that are close to it. This is, for example, the case of the Briefcam solution, an Israeli company among the market leaders, which gives video operators the possibility of filtering the people filmed according to their gender, their skin color or their clothing. Many local authorities already use automatic license plate reading systems which, for example, identify users who have not paid for their parking. A practice against which the National Commission for Computing and Liberties (CNIL) warned in 2020.
Video surveillance in public spaces is prohibited by default but authorized under conditions since 1995: each installation of a camera must be subject to prefectural authorization. According to the CNIL, this principle of “licitness” (a technology cannot be deployed without a text explicitly authorizing it) applies to other surveillance tools potentially infringing on fundamental freedoms, such as automated video surveillance. “Such devices are by no means a simple technical “extension” of existing cameras, noted the institution in 2022. They modify their very nature through their capacity for detection and automated analysis. »
Despite this prohibition in principle, the legal vagueness that remains around the VSA has allowed many municipalities or organizations to seize it. This is for example the case of Valenciennes, in the North, which until 2021 used Huawei technologies to identify suspicious behavior and intrusions in certain perimeters. Or even the town of Libourne, in Gironde, and the RATP, which has been experimenting with these technologies since 2018.
“Video surveillance by algorithm poses the same problems as facial recognition”, judge Noémie Levain, lawyer at La Quadrature du Net. This main French association for the defense of public and digital freedoms denounces “the same risks to public freedoms and the same possibilities of abuse by the police, whose racist practices have been widely documented”. A criticism widely shared by Amnesty International, which also points out, in a press release published in January, the low effectiveness of these technologies in the fight against crime.
They are however a necessity, retort in chorus the government, the parliamentarians of the majority and the organizations representing the companies of the sector. Everyone sees VSA as an additional means of guaranteeing the maintenance of order during the sporting event, without opting for technology as intrusive as facial recognition. “We have followed the recommendations of the CNIL to the letter”, assured, at the beginning of March, the Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, before the Committee on Laws and Cultural Affairs of the National Assembly.
The experimental phase provided for by the bill runs until December 31, 2024, but all the associations are worried about a long-term generalization. “This law is a Trojan horse to permanently install automated video protection in public space”, denounces Noémie Levain. “A classic strategy” of major sporting events, says the activist, widely documented by Jules Boykoff, author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics (Verso, 2016). “Since 2001, all the Olympic Games have served as a pretext for the deployment of new security technologies”, thus slices with the World the American academic. In 2012, for example, the London Games led to the generalization of video surveillance in the streets of the capital. Also deployed on an experimental basis during the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia, facial recognition is still used today to monitor the entire Moscow population.
