Software that authorizes municipal police to report crowds in real time “suspicious” ; cameras that allow “automated surveillance of people whose movements are constantly recorded”… With technopolice (Divergences Editions, 200 pages, 16 euros), Félix Tréguer, CNRS researcher and member of the collective of the same name, offers an exhaustive overview of this great trend in our contemporary societies, driven by security discourses that take on more and more importance every day. of the happy technophilia.
This race for “algorithmic governance” Considers that public authorities join the private sector to promote, based on the 2018 Villani report, the logic of the “regulatory sandbox”. In other words, it involves testing derogatory measures under a double principle: avoiding the need for a single emergency that justifies the implementation of more efficient tools, not hindering the surveillance of the industrial sector through “procedural shackles”.
As expected, it is not uncommon for these supposedly temporary tests to end up perpetuated by law or by simple use, under the helpless gaze of control bodies such as the National Commission for Informatics and Liberties, which, according to the author, has become a registration chamber and regulatory support for a booming sector. To the detriment of public liberties, it is evident.
Relentless demonstration
For this reason, writes Félix Tréguer, in the absence of real safeguards, the technopolice has become a “anthropological phenomenon, almost a total social fact », “supported by networks of actors that operate at varied geographical scales, coming from diverse social fields and who do not agree on everything but whose combined efforts reproduce something coherent, namely, the institution of techno-security solutionism as a governmental reflection ».
The affirmation, militant, is assumed if it is not claimed. It does not take anything away from the manifestation, relentless and nourished by abundant sources (241 references to articles, reports, works, or more than one per page of text). suspected of “militant willing to think”The author also takes fascinating tours through history and uses the reportage technique with great talent.
His work, both in tone and form, is, therefore, in the best line of the Anglo-Saxon research book: documented and precise regarding its main theme, it does not refrain from any incursion into the disciplinary fields of sociology, philosophy or personal experience. .
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