July 26, 2024, opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. On the banks of the Seine, in Paris, the athletes and the Olympic flame parade slowly under the applause of a huge crowd of 600,000 people… and under the watchful eye of hundreds of algorithmic surveillance cameras, trained to spot abnormal behavior. There is nothing dystopia about this scenario, because that is precisely what a law passed recently by Parliament. The experimentation with “augmented” or algorithmic video surveillance, permitted thanks to the organization of the Olympic Games, runs until March 2025. And it is already causing associations for the defense of civil liberties to jump.
We wanted to know more about the fears caused by surveillance cameras. What device is planned? What does the Cnil (National Commission for Computing and Liberties) say, which monitors these subjects? And what about the effectiveness of these solutions? Our answers are to be discovered in our long video format, also to be found on our YouTube channel.