2024-05-07 11:44:04
This text resituates the speech by Technopolice Marseille at the press conference of the anti-Olympic coordination in Marseille, on Tuesday May 7, 2024, on the eve of the arrival of the Olympic flame in the Marseille city.
The Olympic Games constitute a gigantic surveillance accelerator, a large playground for the police and their technological service providers.
The “event” that constitutes the arrival of the flame in Marseille illustrates this in itself given the deployment of security forces on an unprecedented scale, which clearly shows to what extent what is presented as a great celebration sporting and popular festival is above all a major police event. In Marseille tomorrow, 6,000 police officers including 3,000 CRS will be deployed, half of the country’s mobile forces will be concentrated there.
Access to the Old Port will be controlled by eleven filtering points with “security pat-downs, visual inspection, search of vehicles and luggage” as part of the “security perimeter” inherited from the state of emergency… As a prelude to QR codes which will return this summer to the capital to have the right to travel. And still in Marseille, the use of helicopters and aerial or underwater surveillance drones will be required.
This first major event linked to the Games also illustrates repression and surveillance of militant movements which proliferates. It is a widely accepted policy of 2019 which has particularly stood out in recent months by targeting environmental, trade union and pro-Palestinian movements, and which is further intensifying during the Olympics. This is evidenced by the increased activity of the intelligence services, particularly vis-à-vis militant groups who would like to assert their opposition to these police and capitalist games, which are much more than sporting ones. But also the increase in the quota for interception of communications by the intelligence services, decided by the government.
This is also evidenced by the multiple bans targeting in particular citizen protests at the Olympics, processions and gatherings. banners, flags, and any form of expression and demand. There are also the so-called “screening” administrative investigations of nearly half a million individuals with the cross-referencing of various police files, and their greater interconnection. Finally, there is the development of new social media monitoring programs at the Ministry of the Interior (Olympic Intelligence Center, National Strategic Command Center).
Everyone has been able to see this in recent weeks: we are also witnessing a accelerated policing of the city center aimed at strengthening the “tourist” appeal of the city with a view to the influx of visitors, notably with the opening of a second police station on the Canebière in place of a cultural space, the strengthening of mobile patrols in the framework of a war on the poor assumed by the police headquarters, the deployment of very visible “mobile” police stations in the Port, and “clearance” operations in Belsunce against exiled people. In the northern neighborhoods too, “clear square” operations, supposed to curb drug trafficking but largely ineffective, have multiplied in recent weeks in the service of absurd government communication. They are almost systematically accompanied by surveillance drones (see our tool for detecting orders authorizing drones or other video surveillance measures). All this, with a town hall that is banking on video surveillance by renouncing its 2020 commitments: 1,650 cameras already installed, 500 new ones voted on on April 19, and a strengthening of the workforce of the CSU, the Urban Supervision Center where the images of video surveillance (60 agents).
Finally, the Olympics are the pretext for an experiment in algorithmic video surveillance (VSA) which particularly worries us. Based on the law relating to the Olympic Games of May 19, 2023, prefectures can thus use algorithms aimed at detecting eight types of situations, in and around places open to the public and transport networks. Crossing a line, walking in the wrong direction or being present in an area with “too high a density of people” could lead to automatic reports to the police. Make no mistake: the danger lies not so much in these few limited uses as in the planned expansion of the use of VSA with, ultimately, the project of systematic and generalized surveillance of space. audience. The promoters of the VSA are already pushing for this expansion via legislative proposals, in particular through the proposed law relating to security in transport, adopted in the Senate and soon to be examined in the Assembly.
To better illustrate the hypocrisy of the “experiments” linked to the JO law, La Quadrature du Net has finally filed a complaint before the CNIL against a totally illegal deployment of VSA and remaining largely under the radar: the Prevent PCP project, brought to light by the Technopolice Marseille collective.
Associating SNCF and RATP with a panel of companies, including the Atos and ChapsVision groups (both also providers of experiments linked to the JO law), Prevent PCP formally takes the form of a public market subsidized by the Union European. In practice, companies see their VSA systems deployed in major European stations to detect “abandoned baggage”, via a method based on the identification and tracking of baggage owners. In France, these VSA systems have been deployed for months in the Gare du Nord and the Gare de Lyon in Paris, or more recently in the Marseille-Saint-Charles station.
This is just one example among hundreds of illegal VSA deployments in France. In conjunction with our locally organized comrades and all those who want to join us, we are coming from launch a campaign to block the VSAby trying to raise awareness and denounce all projects, whether linked to the OJ law or not.
A city saturated with an oppressive police presence, the war on the poor assumed, public space commodified, protests made invisible, generalized surveillance. Is this the Olympic party? #NoJO2024 #NoJO2030
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