Category Technopolice
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 …
My new book "Technopolice" is out!
The book Technopolice (in French only) is out! Get it from Éditions Divergences. Here is the summary: “Drones, predictive software, algorithmic video-surveillance, facial recognition: the use of the latest technologies of control is becoming commonplace within the police. Far from curbing crime, all these innovations are actually amplifying state violence. They place the city under siege and close up our political imaginations. This is what …
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 …
Government & Industry Working Hand in Hand to Impose Facial Recognition
Op-Ed in French written with Martin Drago, lawyer at La Quadrature du Net, and published in Le Monde on October 25, 2019. L’inévitable débat sur la reconnaissance faciale arrive enfin en France, et le gouvernement esquisse sa réponse. Dans un entretien paru dans Le Monde du 15 octobre, le secrétaire d’Etat au numérique Cédric O, ancien cadre du groupe Safran, a notamment estimé qu’« expérimenter » la reconnaissance faciale était « nécessaire pour …