The Eternal Return of Facial Recognition
This Op-Ed is adapted from a text originally published on AOC.
In May 2025, Gérald Darmanin was getting restless. Overtaken on the right by his successor at the Ministry of Interior, Bruno Retailleau, the new Minister of Justice apparently found it difficult to hang up his apron as “France’s top cop.” So he pulled out of his hat a seemingly novel proposal: the legalization of real-time facial recognition.
The ink on the War on …