The State and Digital Surveillance in Times of the Covid-19 Pandemic
First published for the CERI’s series on the COVID-19 pandemic. Last February, as the COVID-19 epidemic was in full swing in China, the world watched in amazement Chinese public authorities enforce drastic measures to curb the spread of the epidemic. In parallel with the generalised containment measures implemented in Hubei province, the Chinese government set up an impressive techno-police...
Release of netCommons' Hands-On Guide on Community Networks
The netCommons project is proud to announce the release of “Telecommunications Reclaimed: A Hands-On Guide to Networking Communities”! Download it from HAL-SHS This book is a guide on how to build a community network, a shared local telecommunications infrastructure, managed as a commons, to access the internet and other digital communications services. It was written collectively by a...
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 »...
‘Direct Action Against Computerization (1960-1990)’
In the political genealogy of computers, and even more so in the dominant historiography of the Internet, [neo-Luddite] opposition has been largely overlooked. Among the actors who contributed in one way or another to shaping these technologies and the discourse surrounding them before the 1990s, postwar humanist scientists and technophile hippies of the 1960s are often mentioned (see, for...
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...
Towards the Automation of Political Censorship
We are at a turning point in the long history of censorship. This turning point is that of private and automated censorship. It marks a radical break with the guarantees associated with freedom of expression that the democratic struggles of the 19th century left us as a legacy. The democratic-liberal heritage trampled underfoot The 1881 law on freedom of the press—now interpreted in the light of...
The Origins of Digital Activism in France
My colleague Patrick Pétin and I have just published an article in the journal Internet Histories that traces the origins of digital activism in France. The idea is to provide some new insights based on interviews conducted with pioneers of the movement over the past two years, but also to raise international awareness of the specificities of the French trajectory, at a time when historiography...
Copyright Directive: the fake confrontation between the two heads of information capitalism
Opinion piece originally published in French in Le Monde Idées on September 9, 2018. For a quarter of a century, we have been watching the same bad movie, in which the cultural industries use the law to wage war on their audience. At issue this time is Article 13 of the Copyright Directive currently under review in Brussels, on which the European Parliament will vote on September 12. In its...
"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...
PhD completed!
Finally! My thesis is finished. After seven years of hard work, I defended it on November 2, 2017 at the EHESS in Paris, surrounded by my loved ones (family, friends, colleagues) and facing a perceptive jury with whom I was able to have a particularly rich discussion. I submitted the PDF to the HAL-SHS archive. Here is the abstract: Taking contemporary debates on freedom of expression and privacy...