Covid-19: legal battle over the use of drones by French police

In Paris, Place de l'Étoile or on the Butte de Montmartre, in Nice or even in Marseille, the scene has already been repeated several times. A somewhat nasal voice from the sky delivers a very clear message: "National police, go home". It comes from a loudspeaker attached to a drone used by the police to help them enforce containment measures since March 15. The League for Human Rights and La Quadrature du Net no longer want to see them above the heads of the French and are fighting in court to obtain a stop to the use of these small remote-controlled flying machines with cameras in Paris. These two associations appealed, Tuesday, May 5, a rejection of their request by the administrative court of Paris.

The TA in Paris rejects our #drone appeal, without addressing any of our arguments but by getting lost in a false debate on the presence or not of personal data.

We have decided to appeal to obtain a more constructive decision from @Conseil_Etat in the coming days. https://t.co/qmf4GhnHKh

These activists fear that this surveillance from the sky may not bode well for our individual freedoms. They had already been thinking for some time to question the use of drones in court to support the police. But they lacked an angle of attack. "The litigation was difficult because it is important to have an administrative act to challenge before an administrative judge. But the opacity surrounding this program prevented us from knowing who gives the order to deploy the drones and on what legal basis", specifies Martin Drago, jurist for La Quadrature du Net, an association which defends rights and freedoms on the Internet.

Legal vagueness

A Mediapart investigation of April 25 devoted to drones has unblocked the situation. The police headquarters recognizes that they are the principal, and above all specifies the legal framework for this operation. Or rather, the absence of a precise legal basis, in particular with regard to image capture, judge Martin Drago. "It was thought that in this case the police were subject to the same rules as for fixed CCTV cameras installed in town, but, in reality, the only framework invoked is that of articles 9 of the civil code and article 226 -1 of the penal code, which is pretty scary, "notes the lawyer. Indeed, the first article simply poses the principle of protection of privacy without further details, while the second prohibits filming people in a private place without their consent.

A legal vagueness that would make this whole operation illegal in the eyes of lawyers from the League for Human Rights and La Quadrature du Net. Without a solid legal basis, the risk of abuse exists, raising the specter of a kind of "health dictatorship" according to Gerard Haas, lawyer specializing in the law of new technologies, interviewed by the daily Le Monde.

The legal action does not only aim to have the use of drones in Paris declared illegal, and by extension to weaken the basis of this use in the thirty other French cities where they are deployed. The two associations are also seeking to "launch a public debate so that we realize the real importance of this deployment and how it allows the police to increase their surveillance power," said Martin Drago.

Zoom and camera quality

Because the legal framework is not the only vague aspect of this operation. The police are very stingy in detail about their use of drones. It acknowledged having a fleet of fifteen vehicles in Paris, and a senatorial report established that there had been, between March 24 and April 24, 535 flights on the national territory, including 251 surveillance missions and the rest to "inform the population" on compliance with containment measures.

But it is impossible to know, for example, how often these winged "big brothers" are deployed in the Parisian sky. Contacted by France 24 on this subject, the capital's prefecture of police "regretted not being able to follow up" on the request. "However, this is exactly the type of question to which we believe we are entitled to an answer," regrets Martin Drago.

Ditto for the videos filmed by the on-board cameras, and the processing of this data. "At the end of the mission, the images are erased from the memory card. They are not subject to any cross-checking with police files", is content to specify the police to Mediapart. Again, the wording remains unclear. The videos and photos are, of course, destroyed from the device's memory, but what about the copies which, as the prefecture recognizes, are sent "in real time to a tablet by the authority responsible for the device or on a dedicated post [computer, editor's note], installed in the command center of the directorate in charge of operations "? The prefecture again refused to respond to France 24's requests in this regard.

Finding out more about the use of these images by the police is all the more important as the drones are equipped with high-end cameras. In Paris, the police use a model from the Chinese company DJI, leader in the sector, renowned "for the quality of its zoom and its camera", underlines Mediapart. In other words, in large, densely populated cities, the images transmitted from the sky by these cameras which include a wide angle behavior almost inevitably detailed views of what is happening in apartments, in defiance of privacy . Whether the police want it or not.

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