While the use of video surveillance at the 2024 Olympics was adopted by senators in January, some forty European elected officials wrote to French deputies to ask them to oppose the experimentation with “intelligent video surveillance” during the next Olympic Games.
The exchanges with the deputies of the National Assembly started very late on Monday March 20, and the discussions should, no doubt, continue until Thursday and probably Friday, with the Minister of Sports and the Olympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra , and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. In the line of fire, but already adopted at first reading in the Senate, article 7 of the bill entitled “ intelligent video surveillance ». It allows video surveillance cameras to be coupled with image processing by artificial intelligence programs.
Scan and save biometric data
The objective of this measure is to ensure the protection of sporting, recreational or cultural events » by automatically identifying « events like suspicious crowd movements for example. It would also be a question of following individuals in particular who would be likely to disturb public order during the Olympics. And to achieve this result, the surveillance cameras will have to scan and record the biometric data of all the people who are then within their radius of action. But announced as an experiment limited in time, this law worries about forty European elected officials who have written to French deputies to ask them to oppose it.
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The authors of this letter call for the rejection of this bill, on the grounds that it would authorize constant and disproportionate surveillance of the French population. Provisions that would be contrary to the spirit of the future EU law on artificial intelligence, currently being discussed in Parliament. ” In its 2021 report, Parliament has already called for a permanent ban on the use of automated analysis, human characteristics and other biometric and behavioral signals », in the countries of the Union, they write.
” Precedent never seen in surveillance »
The majority MEPs in the EU Parliament are threatening to challenge this law which they consider to be non-compliant with the GDPR, the European regulation on the protection of personal data. At the beginning of March, the Minister of Sports, before the National Assembly’s Committee on Laws and Cultural Affairs, wanted to be reassuring by replying that the use of artificial intelligence programs in the context of the security of the Olympic Games would never be use facial recognition.
The experimental phase provided for by the bill runs until December 31, 2024, and MEPs, mainly from the Greens, Social Democrats and United Left groups in the European Parliament, fear the long-term generalization of these surveillance techniques under the guise of experimentation. ” If the law is passed in its current form, France will set a surveillance precedent never seen in Europe “, they believe. An opinion shared by 38 civil society organizations, including Amnesty International, recalling in a press release published in January, that this automatic video surveillance, already deployed in many countries around the world to fight crime, has never brought the slightest proof of its effectiveness.