15.248 people file a complaint against the Technopolice (LQDN)

The Technopolice campaign, launched by La Quadrature du Net in September 2019 to document the progress of automated surveillance in France, reached a new milestone this Saturday, September 24: a collective complaint against the Minister of the Interior, brought by 15 people, has been filed with the CNIL (National Commission for Computing and Liberties). She calls for a ban on surveillance cameras, facial recognition and ground plug of the French population. To read the complaints, it's here: file TAJ, file TS et video surveillance.

In a context of the abandonment of public policies to fight against inequalities or poverty, security and repressive devices appear more and more as the single and monotonous answer given to all social questions. Surveillance is arguably the laziest and least sustainable way to build a society. There is, however, a systematic desire on the part of the State to encourage generalized surveillance, by means of subsidies, of instructions given to prefects and the police hierarchy, and by the establishment of a political climate that is constantly repressive. It is therefore by directly attacking the Minister of the Interior that we are going on the offensive against the technopolice, by asking the CNIL to put an end to the countless cameras, automated video surveillance software, facial recognition and mega- citizen files.

There are plenty of reasons to challenge the legality of surveillance devices. Our law is based in particular on two strong conditions: a measure of surveillance or repression is only legitimate in law, or legal, if it is absolutely necessary (we cannot do otherwise) and if it is proportionate to the misdemeanor or crime it intends to circumvent (one does not hunt a fly with an aircraft carrier). Formally, we have divided the attack into three complaints, against three disproportionate surveillance systems that complement and feed each other to maintain permanent control of our activities and movements:

• • First, the TAJ file (processing of criminal records) which is illegal on two counts. First of all, this file is disproportionate : it collects information on any person concerned by an investigation (complainants, witnesses, suspects), i.e. today more than 20 million files, but, in practice, everything tends to show that this file is fed and used outside the legal frameworks and that a lot of data is incorrect or stored for much longer than the law requires. Afterwards, this file is used by the police and the gendarmerie to perform facial recognition several thousand times a day, outside of any legal framework. Also, the intrusiveness and the dangers of this technology are much more obvious with the ubiquitous video surveillance which multiplies the possibilities of obtaining images of our faces.
    Read the complaint against the TAJ file
  • The second complaint therefore concerns this widespread video surveillance. We first demonstrate to the CNIL to what extent State action is essential and omnipresent in the unlimited deployment of cameras in cities, and now in villages. Whether it concerns active policies of subsidies, incentive to integrate algorithmic software to these cameras or the systematic intervention of the prefectures in the acts of authorization of these devices, the Minister of the Interior acts at so many stages of this phenomenon that he must be considered, legally, as responsible. And precisely, the prefectural acts which are the legal basis for the installation of these cameras never say how they would be useful for the purposes provided for by the internal security code. Video surveillance is therefore illegal because it is disproportionate and without justification.. We are therefore attacking the Minister of the Interior who is implementing all these government incentive practices which make this disproportion possible.
    Read the CCTV Complaint
  • Finally, the last complaint concerns the TES file (secure electronic titles). This file brings together the photographs of all people with an identity card or a passport, that is to say almost everyone, solely in order to facilitate the renewal and verification of identity documents. Criticized since its creation in 2016 with regard to the enormous dangers posed by the very existence of a centralized database of such sensitive data, we reiterate these alerts in two ways. Already we point the lack of necessity and proportionality of this file, especially as since last year there has been another, less intrusive way of achieving the same objective of facilitating the verification of titles (in this case, access to this data can now be done in a decentralized way by putting them directly on each identity carrier in a chip). Afterwards, we denounce the failings of the state who deliberately maintained these technical choices, in full knowledge of all the risks posed by this centralized architecture on the possibility of diverting and misusing the file (even more now with the improvement of facial recognition). Legally, the Minister of the Interior does not fulfill the security obligations to which he is bound.
    Read the complaint against the TES file

We therefore ask that all of these actions by the police be controlled, that they be put an end to them and that the Minister of the Interior be sanctioned for having encouraged and allowed these illegal practices to take place.

The CNIL must now take into account the voices of the thousands of people who have joined the complaint and show their firm opposition to this surveillance dynamic and the deployment of these technologies which most often escape all control.. At a time when a regulation on artificial intelligence is being debated at European level, when merchants of algorithmic video surveillance are pushing for the legalization of their tools and when the 2024 Olympic Games are announced as the pretext for experimenting with an array of ever more intrusive technologies under cover of a security context, it is urgent to reverse the balance of power. Thanks to you and the enthusiasm that this collective action has generated, the offensive is launched but the battle against the Technopolice has only just begun!

source: Laquadrature.net