AI Surveillance State, Officially
August 4, 2024: “Always eyes watching you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed: no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres in your skull.”
These chilling lines are from Nineteen Eighty-Four, British novelist George Orwell’s timeless classic on global dystopia that was written in 1949. Fast forward to 2024. The celebrated city of Paris, where everyone wants to visit at least once in their lifetime, is turning Orwell’s fictional dystopia into a reality – using the Olympics as a convenient cover.
Paris is midway into hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics. But this time, it’s not just another edition of the widely followed Games. It’s the onset and ‘normalisation’ of a new abnormal – a new dark era – of technology-based mass surveillance never attempted before.
Between July 26 to August 11 in 2024, the French government is turning Paris into a giant laboratory of state-conducted espionage. And it’s being done officially and legally (more on the official and legal aspects later on in the article).
If all this sounds incredible and conspiratorial to you, then it’s primarily because popular media outlets aren’t telling you about the dystopian development at all. The mainstream media did briefly cover the matter when it was brewing last year. But it’s is now completely ignoring it while the Olympic Games are underway.
Orwellian Olympics
For the first time, artificial intelligence (AI) technology is being used to conduct full-spectrum video surveillance on lakhs of unsuspecting people. People visiting Paris to watch and participate in the Olympic Games. Every individual is being watched by outgoing French president Emmanuel Macron’s surveillance-crazy government.
Big Brother, to borrow the famous term from George Orwell’s book, is tracking and tracing each and every move. People’s body language, their activities, their movements, and their physical interactions – everything is being recorded. And this data is being analysed real-time by an opaque AI technology that the government doesn’t want the press and the people to know about in detail.
Essentially, Paris has become a police state. It sounds incredible because the mainstream press is not reporting it at all. The city is flooded with hidden cameras and public-view CCTV cameras. Streets. Shopping areas. Venues. Public squares. Public transport. Parking areas. Visiting delegations. Athletes. Journalists. Volunteers. Lakhs of tourists. Lakhs of locals. Migrants. Minorities. Dissidents. Protesters. Even high-profile guests. The French version of Orwell’s Big Brother is monitoring everybody and everything under the sun – and the moon.
The French government has given a convenient excuse for deploying this alarming mass spying project. It says it wants to try out AI technology to ensure that the Olympic Games take place safely and securely like never before. It says AI is helping French authorities spot unusual behavioural patterns and unusual movements among people in Paris. And that, we are told, is helping French intelligence and French police to take cautionary steps.
France’s dirty past
Now, the question is: is the safe conduct of the Games a genuine justification for turning what used to be a tourist-friendly city into a surveillance state? Is it alright to snoop into the lives of lakhs of innocent sports lovers, sportspersons, and tourists? What is the guarantee that the French security forces will not have biases in their policing and snooping tactics? We all know that France has a dirty past of bullying its minority and migrant populations. Will French cops become more hostile towards non-Whites and migrants?
In March last year, when French lawmakers happily okayed the ‘Olympic surveillance bill’, there was a strong pushback against it. Some French parliamentarians raised an alarm. But then, they were selfish enough to just stop at criticising it; they didn’t step down from the National Assembly, the country’s parliament.
So, once the new law was okayed by the larger majority in the French parliament, it was challenged legally as well. But the high court in Paris firmly supported the law and dismissed the challenge.
The surveillance law has drawn a wave of criticism from international activists and human rights bodies. They had been warning that the world’s biggest sporting event would become the most significant episode of human rights and privacy rights abuse under the guise of AI-based mass surveillance.
The European Union (EU), which often stands up against privacy violations on European soil, questioned the move. Last year, the EU shot off a warning letter to the French parliament. In the letter, the EU said France was setting a mass surveillance example of the kind never seen before in Europe, and it would be using the Olympics as a pretext.
Amnesty, HRW
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are two pro-Western watchdogs that routinely ignore violations committed by G7 countries. But in this case, both of them slammed the new French initiative.
London-based Amnesty says the French government has effectively decided to defy the EU’s pro-people efforts to rein in the penetration of AI in our life. It fears that the tech-based tracking programme could permanently turn France into a dystopian surveillance state. And it could go on to set the stage for large-scale violations of human rights.
New York-based HRW (Human Rights Watch) is worried that the 2024 Olympics surveillance project could later set the stage for biometric spying of the public all across France. It argues that the new plan is a step towards ‘normalising’ the use of exceptional surveillance powers.
Rugby World Cup
There’s a deeper problem with the French plan. The government keeps saying that it has been brought in only for the safe conduct of the Olympic Games. But they’re clearly lying to the world going by the way things are unfolding. The law actually came into effect last year itself.
Between September 8 and October 28, France hosted the Rugby World Cup, which South Africa won. The government decided at that time to test the new AI surveillance system on the people while the World Cup was in progress. All the venues where the World Cup matches were played were placed under strict AI-based surveillance – and again, the mainstream press didn’t report it.
Crucially, the French surveillance law says that the snooping project will continue right up to March 2025, which is well after the 2024 Olympics! What does that tell you? Clearly, it’s not exclusively about protecting people during the Olympic Games. The law came into force in the months leading up to the Olympics, being deployed at various French festivals, large gatherings, and public events. Basically, any place involving more than 300 people could be placed on surveillance without their consent under the new law.
All this simply means the 2024 Olympics is only an excuse. French people and visitors to France, especially in Paris, are already living in an undeclared police state. You’re not being told so, however, because the mainstream media has been tutored to portray the surveillance programme to you positively, if not to ignore reporting it.
National Gendarmerie
The truth about modern-day France is that no matter how blindly people love and worship the country, it is already an undeclared police state, albeit low-key. France is one of few countries that has a formal military wing patrolling the streets as policemen.
There’s something called a National Police force that patrols the big cities, including Paris. But thousands of small towns and villages are all patrolled largely by the militarised police force. It’s called the National Gendarmerie. The military cops are often criticised by human rights groups for carrying out brutal crackdowns on migrants and minorities.
Well, it’s true that France has seen multiple heinous terror attacks over the last decade. But then, the French forces have also reacted in equally inhuman ways, routinely targeting innocent non-White residents and making them feel uneasy and unwelcome, instead of addressing the root causes of terrorism.
Three years back, the French parliament presented what is called the ‘national domestic security bill’. It instantly sparked a huge nationwide debate. There were fears that neighbourhood police personnel would become more armed and militarised than ever before, and therefore, more intrusive. There would be a lot more tech-driven surveillance, police body cameras, use of spy drones, and a lot of armed private security firms.
The bill ostensibly tried to protect French police from dissidents and critics. But it eventually paved the way for a permanent police state.
CCTV cameras
Surveillance of the common people has morphed into a huge problem in France. It is estimated that the country’s video surveillance industry would grow exponentially in the coming decade. The main push in the rising numbers is going to come from the government, which wants to implement advanced video surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition and all sorts of new-age AI.
As of 2022, France had 1.65 million or 16.5 lakh CCTV cameras publicly installed across the country – which is quite a lot, really.
It wasn’t a surprise when France signed a major surveillance technology deal with Taiwan in April last year. As part of that agreement, French companies would help Taiwan build state-of-the-art surveillance drones. Well, it’s natural for the French corporations to be doing this, given their government’s fascination for spying on its own people.
Big Brother is watching you
What is the deep impact of this blatant, Big Brother-style surveillance unfolding right now? If you feel you are being watched and your movements are being filmed, you will naturally always be on the backfoot, isn’t it? With surveillance comes the increasing militarisation of police. Once the heavily policed social environment becomes the new abnormal, you would no longer feel like moving around freely, or expressing critical opinion as freely as you’d want to.
What a police state environment does is, it changes your behavioural pattern for good. It tames you.
You’ll lose command over your private life for the sake of so-called national security. Once that happens, you will lose your natural tendency to stand up for your rights. Without even realising it, you’ll become a part of ‘Oceania’, the fictional setting of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
French presidents and French celebs often lecture the world about human rights, freedom, democracy, and free speech. But by cleverly using the 2024 Paris Olympics as a stepping stone, France is silently and sheepishly turning its capital city into Orwell’s Oceania.
(This is an updated version of a report first published on June 13, 2023. Thanks for reading and sharing it. For more reports like this, keep an eye on our website EmpireDiaries.com.)
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