Surveillance State of Play in France
I wrote a short chapter on digital surveillance for a collective work entitled Le Nouveau Monde, which has just been published by Amsterdam Editions. Over 1,000 pages and nearly 100 authors paint a “picture of neoliberal France”.
For my part, I have attempted in a few pages to describe the expansion of digital surveillance in recent years, its promoters, its methods, and its effects, while trying to place it within the longer history of information technology.
Excerpt:
In December 2016, arguments are flying within the ”Defense and Security“ working group formed around Emmanuel Macron, a declared candidate for the French presidency. For several weeks, through messages exchanged between them, the small team has been considering the appropriate response to François Fillon’s ”security" program. The right-wing candidate has expressed his desire to impose a biometric ID card on the French people? Never mind! Macron’s advisors are considering adopting the proposal, as are François Heisbourg, a geopolitical expert and former director of Thomson CSF (now the defense giant Thales), and Commissioner Marianne Tarpin, a senior official at the General Directorate for Internal Security (DGSI). In discussions, the protagonists emphasize the need to combat identity fraud, citing in particular terrorists from Syria who were able to move freely throughout Europe using false documents, and it is agreed that the issue should be explored further.
Anne Bouverot, then CEO of Morpho (now Idemia), the French leader in biometric identity, was recently co-opted by the small group of advisors. In a memo submitted for collective consideration, she begins by highlighting the cost of the biometric ID card—€2 per unit, or approximately €140 million for the entire French population—and suggests that citizens pay for it directly. According to her, the rollout of this card will lead to “a reduction in fraud and associated costs,” “greater security, and [a] more effective fight against terrorism.” But that’s not all: thanks to facial recognition and the biometric data stored on the microchip in this new ID card, a myriad of other uses are also possible, particularly for the private sector. Bouverot mentions the possibility of “validating a person’s identity during a secure digital transaction: signing a contract, purchasing a plane ticket, transferring money between different countries, etc.”
The very next day, December 12, Didier Casas, a senior civil servant and then deputy CEO of Bouygues Telecom, sent a message to Alexis Kohler, Emmanuel Macron’s advisor who would become secretary general of the Élysée, and to Ismaël Emelien, in charge of communications and strategic affairs for the campaign: biometric identity, “are you buying it or not, frankly?” “Honestly, meh,” Emelien replied a few hours later. The proposal was therefore not included in Macron’s campaign platform. Biometric identity—introduced in France in 2009 under pressure from the United States with the creation of the biometric passport—will nevertheless make a decisive breakthrough during his term, whether through the ALICEM smartphone app, which has been in trial since June 2019, or the famous “electronic national identity card” (CNIe), finally launched in the summer of 2021.
These exchanges, both mundane and remarkable, offer a good overview of the processes that govern the headlong rush into digital surveillance: the short-term interests of political, administrative, and economic elites intersect and even align as they move back and forth between the public and private spheres, while global unrest and political one-upmanship fuel an escalation in security measures, which in turn feeds the surveillance industry by providing it with new opportunities. At the crossroads of social control ambitions, support for industrial flagships, attempts at bureaucratic rationalization, and an ever-increasing propensity for “technological solutionism,” surveillance is spreading and fueling the rise of authoritarian liberalism.
This chapter is available for free on HAL-SHS.