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France’s police bill: surveillance for the long haul
First published on about:intel. The French government seems not to be interested in tackling systemic police violence. Instead, one of the most defining features of Macron’s presidency lies in the fast-paced expansion of state surveillance powers. A case in point is Parliament’s impending adoption of the “Bill on Global Security”, which shows the current administration is a leading representative of the rising wave of authoritarian-liberalism …
Data Politics is out
A new book on « Data Politics » is fresh out. Edited by professor Didier Bigo, Engin Isin and Evelyn Ruppert, it is part of Routledge Serie in International Political Sociology. I contributed a chapter titled « Seeing Like Big Tech: Security assemblages, technology, and the future of state bureaucracy ». Here is the abstract: This chapter looks at post-Snowden contention between US technology companies – firms like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, …
"A new figure of power is emerging before our eyes"
In French only. Je reproduis ici un entretien avec le journaliste Clément Pouré de Motherboard. Motherboard – Début janvier, Emmanuel Macron annonçait un projet de loi sur les fake news. Faut-il s’inquiéter d’une éventuelle censure ? Félix Tréguer – Le projet d’Emmanuel Macron reste assez flou à ce stade, mais les mesures envisagées semblent cibler l’utilisation des systèmes de contenus sponsorisés sur les plateformes et seraient limitées aux …
Gaps and bumps in the political history of the internet
I have a new paper out at the Internet Policy Review. It is based on a personal experience but it is also meant as an introduction to the political historiography of the Internet (the full list of references is here, and an extended version of the bibliography is available in this bibtex file).
Le coût écologique d’internet est trop lourd, il faut penser un internet low-tech
Le combat pour une informatique émancipatrice échoue le plus souvent à expliquer les effroyables coûts écologiques et humains du numérique. Un internet low-tech est nécessaire afin de nous émanciper des sphères technocratiques et industrielles. avec Gaël Trouvé. Tribune publiée sur Reporterre L’an dernier, un contributeur de la revue anglo-saxonne <i>Phrack,</i> publication phare de la mouvance hacker, appelait de ses vœux la …
De la dépêche secrète aux Crypto Wars (brève histoire politique du chiffrement)
Ce texte a été publié dans le numéro 365 de La Chronique, le magazine d’Amnesty International (avril 2017). L’acuité des débats contemporains autour du droit au chiffrement de nos communications et données numériques pourrait faire oublier qu’il renvoie en réalité d’un droit ancien. Il est en effet indéfectiblement lié au secret des correspondances, lui-même protégé depuis le milieu du XVIIIème siècle. Quant à la cryptologie – la « science du …
Internet Is a Fundamental Right, French Constitutional Court Says
Yesterday at 5P.M, the French Constitutional Council – in charge of checking the conformity of legislation with the Constitution – rendered a groundbreaking decision regarding the highly controversial “three strikes law” (or graduated response), passed last month by Parliament to fight illegal downloading. The law established a penalty amounting to the suspension of downloaders’ internet connection without appropriate judicial safeguards. Yet, …
The Political Economy of the Web 2.0
This article by John Naughton, professor at the Open University, is one of the most comprehensive ten-page articles you can get on new media. Naughton very well describes some of the characteristics of what he calls the “emerging media ecosystem”: user-generated content, cooperation and sharing. Referring to Neil Postman, he draws a relevant analogy between the media and ecology. The media ecosystem is extremely historically unstable. Just like …
Could the Internet End Up Killing the Public Sphere?
A few weeks ago, the French Journal Le Débat published a compelling piece by Benjamin Loveluck entitled « Internet: Toward a Radical Democracy?« . The author, who is writing a Ph.D thesis on « the hypermodern individual and the genealogy of contemporary media regime__s” (sic), successfully locates the recent developments of the internet within the history of liberal-democracies. He demonstrates that although the internet is based on humanistic …
Facing the Crisis, the European Union Should Imitate Obama’s Reliance on New Technologies to Bring About Change
Determined to act swiftly to pass an $825 billion stimulus package, US President Barack Obama used his weekly address (on a revamped whitehouse.gov website) to give more details about this recovery plan. As it stands now, the proposal includes public spending programs in three high-tech areas : computerization of medical records; creation of smarter, high-tech enhanced electrical grids; expansion of high speed internet lines in undeserved areas. …