massive and “intelligent” surveillance approved for the Olympic Games – Liberation

It’s done. A majority of deputies adopted the programming law for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris on Tuesday, before a probably identical vote in the Senate on Wednesday. Algorithmic cameras (but without facial recognition), body scanners, generalized administrative investigations, sanctions against intrusions into sports grounds… With the exception of measures against doping or for commercial purposes, such as derogations from labor law on Sundays, the above all, the law consecrates resolutely safe Parisian Olympics.

“Suspicious” behavior

Emblematic, article 7 of the law authorizes video surveillance assisted by artificial intelligence (or “algorithmic”). If the National Commission for IT and Freedom (Cnil) was delighted that facial recognition was discarded, the planned devices include a real-time analysis of“events” defined as suspicious, including behaviors (isolated and static person, crowd movements, intrusion into a prohibited area, etc.) A Tribunesigned in March by 37 human rights organizations, called for the withdrawal of this article which, according to them, “would set a worrying precedent for unjustified and disproportionate surveillance in the public space, to the detriment of fundamental rights and freedoms”.

Authorization for algorithmic video surveillance will run until March 31, 2025, more than seven months after the closing of the Olympic Games. Temporary measure or deleterious gear? For The Squaring of the netthe taboo of “augmented” surveillance is being eroded a little more, carrying the risk of a “ratchet effect”or the way “an exceptional event justifies exceptional measures which will never be called into question thereafter”.

The Olympic Games will in any case represent the first full-scale test on such a scale, in France, of AI video surveillance. Moreover, even if it means using major sporting events to develop and refine mass surveillance, you might as well take advantage of each of them. The Renaissance deputy Guillaume Villetet, rapporteur for the law, thus asked the rostrum of the National Assembly to use the images captured during the Rugby World Cup, from September 8 to October 28, “for algorithm learning purposes”specifying that it would therefore be necessary “provide for an exceptional extension of the storage period of video protection images”.

Preventive investigations

Monitoring will also take place ahead of the Games. The law extends administrative inquiries for prior identification to persons present in fan zones (excluding spectators). Either an extension of this technique of “screening”conducted by a national police service, normally reserved for sports venues for “big events”.

From now on, participants will also be included (athletes, staff, referees or event judges), previously excluded from these personal and preventive investigations. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people will be affected. Last major arsenal, scanners “millimeter wave bodily”, used in airports, can be deployed near sports facilities. Here, everyone will be affected.

Prevent militant happenings

Activist tied to the net of Roland Garros, dam on the Tour de France in the summer of 2022… While the interruptions of sporting events multiply, in as many cries of warning on the climate emergency, the text hardens the criminal sanctions incurred by activists. The law already prohibited the fact of entering a stadium or a sports track drunk, but also “to disturb the progress of a competition or to undermine the safety of persons or property, by entering the competition area of ​​a sports arena”.

Now, the simple fact of “to enter by force or by fraud” in a sports arena will be liable to a fine of €7,500 and six months’ imprisonment, when the person “to enter or remain, without legitimate reason” in these spaces will be subject to a fine of €7,500. “Those who would like to criticize the Olympic Games in their consumerist or ecocide dimension now know what to expect”tackled the deputy LFI Élisa Martin in the hemicycle.

With the creation of these two offences, the majority seems to be providing a purely repressive response to the fiasco of the Champions League final at the Stade de France last May, which the Ministry of the Interior attributed almost exclusively – and wrongly – to the presence of spectators without tickets. While trying to prevent any militant happening in sports arenas. With, in the end, very smooth Olympics, under the eye of the police?