“Technopolice”. The organization La Quadrature du Net and many other associated associations have used this term since 2019 to designate and document the technologies used for surveillance and repression, both at local and national levels. Now it is also the title of a book: Technopolice. Policing in the age of artificial intelligence (Divergencias editions, 2024, 16 euros), published on Friday, October 11.
Signed by Félix Tréguer, researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and member of La Quadrature du Net, a privacy defense organization, this work analyzes in particular the stages that led to one of the great innovations in security. permitted by legislation relating to the Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP): algorithmic video surveillance (VSA), a technology that automatically analyzes video surveillance feeds for behavior that requires an alert.
A report evaluating the effectiveness of the VSA experiment must be presented before the end of the year, but the Ministry of the Interior and the Prefect of Paris have already spoken out in favor of its perpetuation. Is this surprising?
Having followed all the debates over the past five years, the JOP law embodies a “baby steps” strategy, as I call it in the book. That is, a way of getting used to, of gradually imposing these algorithmic video surveillance technologies, focusing first on use cases that are relatively insensitive from the point of view of public liberties, but in a legalization process that, of course, could extend to the most controversial applications of VSA, particularly facial recognition.
Are there scientific analyzes today that give a clear vision of the security advantages offered by VSA technologies?
It must be remembered that they are at a relatively early stage of development and large-scale deployment in police operational practices. It was also one of the objectives of the JOP law and of this experiment to test and perfect, on a technical level, the operation of these algorithms. So, as far as I know, there is no macroscopic study that can really draw conclusions in terms of effectiveness.
We only have small elevators here and there. Like a sociologist who conducted a survey at the urban monitoring center of a large city in the south of France, which uses this technology to detect illegal dumping of garbage. At the end of his field work, he reported that one out of every two alerts produced by the system was actually a false positive, therefore, a false alert.
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