This month, when Emmanuel Macron’s newly chosen prime minister, Michel Barnier, laid out his first government agenda to the National Assembly, much attention was naturally focused on the budget and immigration. But a seemingly throwaway line pointed to another aspect of security and policing. “We will generalize the methods experimented with during the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” Barnier promised.
I have previously written for Jacobin about the controversial algorithmic video surveillance that France rolled out in advance of the Olympics — a test that was supposed to last through March 2025 and concern only large-scale public events like sporting matches and concerts. Experts in surveillance and human rights told me about the debilitating effects that such mass surveillance can have on dissent and peaceful protest — creating a dissuasive “chilling effect.”
“You get people used to it in that happy face, ‘celebration capitalism’ environment of the Olympics, and then that new technology that was injected during the Games in that state of exception becomes the norm for policing moving forward,” Jules Boykoff, a political scientist who has published multiple books about the Olympics, warned at the time.
As if on cue, as soon as the Olympics ended, a steady drumbeat of Macronist politicians began manufacturing consent around the need to keep this technology, which has not yet been independently studied or analyzed.
In September, less than two weeks after the Paralympic closing ceremony, Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez declared himself “in favor” of extending the technology. The news channel France Info, citing a government source, reported that Barnier’s interior minister also envisioned making the technology…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Phineas Rueckert
