Technopolice, police surveillance in the era of artificial intelligence published today by Divergences. In this book, Félix Tréguer, member of La Quadrature du Net and associated researcher at the CNRS Internet & Society Center, gives the personal account of a commitment within the Technopolice collective. Combining anecdotes from the field with analyzes from the human and social sciences, it traces the mechanisms that govern the growing technologization of policing and urban management.
Résumé
Here is the summary of the book, available in your local bookstore.
“Drones, predictive software, algorithmic video surveillance, facial recognition: the use of the latest control technologies is becoming commonplace within the police. Far from curbing crime, all these innovations actually contribute to amplifying state violence. They close our political imaginations and place the city under security control. This is what this book shows based on experiences and knowledge forged during recent struggles against police surveillance. From the security industry to the mysteries of the Ministry of the Interior, from the CNIL to the patrolling officer’s vehicle, he traces the links that techno-solutionist hegemony maintains with the current authoritarian drift. »
Presentations
- October 12: Nice, Les Parleuses bookstore, 7 p.m.
- October 18: Marseille, L’Hydre aux mille têtes bookstore, 7 p.m.
- November 5: Paris, Informal Tuesdays of the General, 7:30 p.m.
- November 6: Montreuil, café-Librairie Michèle Firk, 7 p.m.
- November 7: Tours, Les Temps Sauvages bookstore, 7 p.m.
- November 20: Sète, New Sétoise bookstore, 7 p.m.
- 21 November: Montpellier, La Carmagnole, 6:30 pm
- November 28: Toulouse, Cinema Utopia Borderouge, 8 p.m.
- December 5: Paris, wine merchant-bookstore Rerenga Wines, 7 p.m.
- December 7: Lyon, La Gryffe bookstore, 3 p.m.
- December 12: Avignon, Youpi! bookstore, 7:30 p.m.
Find all the dates in La Quadrature’s public calendar.
Excerpts
“When our turn comes to speak, Martin and I take the stage. Faced with the crowded amphitheater, faced with the kepis and suits and ties, faced with Commander Schoenher and the futurologist from the police headquarters, faced with Prefect Vedel and the executives from Idemia or Thales, we must foil the trap which is handed to us. In the little time we have, we tell them we know. We know that what they are waiting for is for us to say what “socially acceptable” laws and practices could be. [s’agissant de la reconnaissance faciale]. The same proposal has just been made to us by the World Economic Forum and the National Digital Council. A little more transparency, a semblance of control by the CNIL, a reduction in racist bias and other apparently “technical” obstacles which these technologies still encounter, and we believe it is possible to ensure an “ethical” compromise between defense automated public order and the rule of law.
But we tell them straight: facial recognition and other VSA technologies [vidéosurveillance algorithmique] must be prohibited. Rather than discussing the terms of “appropriate supervision”, we express our refusal. We tell them that, for us, security consists first of all in dignified housing, healthy air, economic and social peace, access to education, political participation, patiently built autonomy, and that these technologies provide none of this. That under the pretext of efficiency, they perpetuate colonial logics and further dehumanize the relationships between police bureaucracies and the population. »
….
“The shift from cybernetic urban planning towards techno-security applications seems irresistible. At the beginning of 1967, in the United States, another commission launched by President Johnson and headed by Kennedy’s former Minister of Justice, Nicholas Katzenbach – who joined IBM in 1969 and spent a good part of his career there – also issued a report on the rise in “disturbances of public order” (…). A large-scale program is proposed: drafting of a national R&D plan which will notably have to look at the approach to penal policies in terms of “system”, statistical surveys coupled with the deployment of computers and geolocation of police vehicles to optimize or even automate the allocation of patrols and adapt in real time to delinquency, automation of biometric identification by fingerprints, decision support technologies in the monitoring of convicted persons, etc. . Techno-security thinking infuses all of the recommendations. And we will notice in passing how much the police of the future of the 1960s resemble ours. As if the future, too, did not pass. »
…
“When technology fails to make policing more accurate or effective in fighting crime, that doesn’t mean it isn’t having an effect. Observing such a failure should rather invite us to shift our perspective: one of the main political functions assigned to technologies does not consist so much in producing “public security” as in relegitimizing police action, in restoring the image of the institution by making believe in progress in terms of efficiency, allocation of resources, good management, transparency, hierarchical control. It has been this way since the end of the 19th century.e century and the beginning of the modernization of the police, when prefect Lépine staged the introduction of new equipment, bicycles or police dogs. It is also a central dimension of the first IT projects of the 1960s to rationalize an administration perceived as archaic. The fact remains that this promise of a police force made more acceptable, transparent or legitimate thanks to technology is always betrayed in practice. »
…
« While the far right asserts itself in an ever more uninhibited manner throughout the field of power, these processes through which liberal elites manage the cognitive dissonance induced by their objective complicity with the ongoing authoritarian spiral form one of the most important cogs more effective from the coming fascism. »
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