Olympics 2024: MEPs' grumbling against "smart video surveillance"

While the use of video surveillance at the 2024 Olympics was adopted by senators in January, about forty MEPs have written to French MPs to ask them to oppose the experimentation of "intelligent video surveillance" during the Olympic Games. © THOMAS SAMSON / AFP

Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow

3 min

While the use of video surveillance at the 2024 Olympics was adopted by senators in January, about forty MEPs have written to French MPs to ask them to oppose the experimentation of "intelligent video surveillance" during the next Olympic Games.

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The exchanges with the deputies of the National Assembly started very late Monday, March 20, and the discussions should, no doubt, extend until Thursday and probably Friday, with the Minister of Sports and Olympic Games, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, and the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin. In the line of fire, but already adopted at first reading in the Senate, Article 7 of the bill entitled "intelligent video surveillance". It allows the coupling of video surveillance cameras with processing by artificial intelligence programs of images.

Scan and register biometrics

The aim of this measure is to ensure the protection of "sporting, recreational or cultural events" by automatically identifying "events" such as suspicious crowd movements, for example. It would also be a question of following individuals in particular who would be likely to disturb public order during the Olympics. And to achieve this result, surveillance cameras will have to scan and record the biometric data of all people within their range. But announced as an experiment limited in time, this law worries about forty MEPs who have written to French MPs to ask them to oppose it.

► Also listen: Video surveillance at the Paris Olympics: "It's a mass scale"

The authors of this letter call for the rejection of this bill, on the grounds that it would allow constant and disproportionate surveillance of the French population. Provisions that would be contrary to the spirit of the future EU law on artificial intelligence, currently under discussion in Parliament. "In its 2021 report, Parliament has already called for a permanent ban on the use of automated analysis, human characteristics and other biometric and behavioral signals," in EU countries, they write.

« Unprecedented precedent for surveillance »

The majority MEPs in the EU Parliament are threatening to reject this law as non-compliant with the GDPR, the European regulation on the protection of personal data. At the beginning of March, the Minister of Sports, before the Committee on Laws and Cultural Affairs of the National Assembly, wanted to be reassuring by replying that the use of artificial intelligence programs in the context of the security of the Olympics would be done without ever using facial recognition.

The French government wants to use a sinister form of algorithm-driven video surveillance during the #Paris #Olympics

That would be illegal under international law.

Read our open letter in @lemondefr on why 👇https://t.co/QDmoLf9uue

— Amnesty EU (@AmnestyEU) March 6, 2023

The experimental phase provided for by the bill runs until 31 December 2024, and MEPs, mainly from the Greens, Social Democrats and United Left groups in the European Parliament, fear the long-term generalisation of these surveillance techniques under the guise of experimentation. "If the law is adopted in its current form, the France will set a precedent for surveillance never before seen in Europe," they said. An opinion shared by 38 civil society organizations, including Amnesty International, recalling in a statement published in January, that this automatic video surveillance, already deployed in many countries around the world to fight crime, has never provided the slightest proof of its effectiveness.

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• Olympics 2024
• Technologies
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