Emmanuel Macron, five years of surveillance and censorship

As the French presidential election approaches, we look back on what Emmanuel Macron’s first term in office and his party’s majority in the National Assembly have meant in terms of surveillance and censorship.

The pieces of legislation or regulation that they have initiated and which have strengthened surveillance and censorship add up to a truly stunning number and itemizing them is a grim exercise. It will, however, reveal the fantasized world that those in power intend to rush us towards: an almighty State and police force, drunk with the power that new technology promises, propping themselves above justice and people’s protests and working hand in hand with a handful of security providers to watch and censor everything, all of the time.

In his 5-year tenure, Emmanuel Macron, through his own actions and those of his government as well as through his domination over the parliamentary majority, will have contributed directly to the ever faster and deeper switch towards a security-obsessed society centered around surveillance and censorship, both by the state and private corporations.

Although they have a few months left to worsen an already alarming situation, we can, as of now, make an assessment of their actions. That assessment is obviously far from exhaustive. First of all, because it is bound by the perimeter of topics La Quadrature du Net has been able to work on and which pertain to its purpose: to defend liberties in the digital world. Secondly, even if we limit ourselves to the digital frontline, this topic has now extended so far in to every nook and cranny of our lives that it is difficult to keep track.

Nonetheless, the toll is particularly heavy: surge in intelligence services’ authority, new police records and databases, ramping up of the administration’s censorship power, multiple partnerships with security providers to multiply internet and street surveillance, massive use of facial recognition by the police…

It should be stated that the current government should not bear the sole responsibility of this democratic collapse. The shift was initiated by Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2000’s before being deployed on a large scale by François Hollande. All these abuses could not have been unleashed so easily if the far-right hadn’t imposed its obsession with exclusion and violence in the public debate. Nor if so many elected officials of the left hadn’t failed to defend a alternative model countering the “Technopolice” in their cities and jurisdictions.

2017

May 14, 2017 : Emmanuel Macron begins his term as President of the French Republic
September 22,2017: Invoking a provocation to terrorism, the Interior Ministry orders the Nantes and Grenoble Indymedia sites to withdraw an anti-authoritarian statement which they published under penalty of being blocked by their ISP’s (our article here, in French). The administrative court of Cergy-Pontoise will ultimately vindicate both sites in January 2019;
October 30, 2017: enactment of the law “strengthening homeland security and the fight against terrorism”. This legal text integrates several measures of the state of emergency (in place since 2015) into common law. It extends the lifespan of telecommunication surveillance “black boxes”, algorithmic probes designed in 2015 to automatically log an entire telecommunication network;
November 14, 2017: the government announces the deployment of the first “black box” activating telecommunication mass-surveillance (our reaction here, in French)

2018

March 9, 2018: enactment of the law on Student orientation and success, which establishes a de facto selection before entering higher education and allows institutions to use algorithms to screen applications. We joined a Priority Question of Constitutionality (QPC) –a legal procedure through which parties can question the constitutionality of a law that applies to them– raised by the National Union of Students of France (UNEF). In 2020, the Constitutional Council reinterpreted the law to partially end the opacity of these sorting algorithms (our reaction, here). The government’s cybersecurity agency (ANSSI) gains new oversight powers. It is now allowed to demand an ISP to install probes on its network to analyse all traffic in order to detect cyber attacks – the direct result of the black boxes established by the 2015 Information Law. We challenge the law’s implementation decree law before the Conseil d’État (French administrative High Court) (appeal rejected at the end of 2021);
September 5, 2018: enactment of the “freedom to choose one’s professional future” law. Article 58 of this law allows an experiment which compels each job seeker to disclose, online and under penalty of losing welfare benefits, “the state of progress of their job search” to Pôle Emploi (the governmental agency which registers unemployed people). Here we analyse the risks of social control that results from such an experimentation;
September 11, 2018: enactment of the “Collomb law” on immigration, which institutes mandatory registration of fingerprints and photos of unaccompanied minor migrants. Following a QPC from migrant aid associations, which La Quadrature joined, the Constitutional Council validated this massive registration in 2019;
November 22, 2018: creation of the “Comité Stratégique de Filière Industries de Sécurité” (Strategic Committee for the Security Industry), which brings all French security companies together under the chairmanship of Marc Darmon, vice-president of Thalès, in cooperation with the government;
December 22, 2018: enactment of the “fake news” (or “information manipulation”) law. In addition to general transparency obligations for some of the major platforms, the law creates an emergency procedure to cease the distribution of items deemed as “fake news” within three months before a national election.

2019

January 14, 2019: the Interior Ministry, via the Fight Against Computer Crime main office, exercises censorship and requests the removal of an image caricaturing Emmanuel Macron as General Pinochet from the Internet;
January 21, 2019: the same day that the CNIL (National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties) sanctions Google to a 50-million-euro fine following a collective complaint brought by LQDN, the government promotes the company on social networks;
March 26, 2019: on Twitter, Emmanuel Macron welcomes the adoption in the European Parliament of the Copyright Directive (our reaction here). A legal text which legitimizes the automated filtering and censorship tools put in place by major Internet platforms to “protect” copyright;
March 31, 2019: Emmanuel Macron appoints Cédric O as Minister for Digital Technology. O is a former employee of Safran, a French armament company and among other things, the parent company of Idemia, a company specializing in facial recognition;
May 13, 2019: publication of the “Alicem” decree which legalizes a digital identity system mandating facial recognition, despite the Cnil’s notice of opposition (our article here). We challenge this decree before the Conseil d’État (French administrative High Court) but lose the suit one year later;
July 24, 2019: enactment of the law on “healthcare system reform” which authorizes the launch of the “Health Data Hub”, a platform to centralize the French population’s health data (via the massive use of algorithms) and to simplify its collection and use for research purposes (our analysis article here);
October 24, 2019: Emmanuel Macron appoints Thierry Breton, Former CEO of Atos (a company with extensive experience in biometric border surveillance and former parent company of Amesys), as European Commissioner. At the European Commission, he will be in charge of championing the French vision of artificial intelligence through several texts including the regulation on artificial intelligence and the “Digital Services Act” ;
December 28, 2019: publication of the 2020 Finance Act (Read our article here). This law, validated by the Constitutional Council, grants the tax authorities and customs the power to monitor social networks in order to collect information and analyse it with their algorithms.

2020

January 30, 2020: a partnership between the State and France’s main security providers is signed which finances, in particular, the surveillance of the Paris Olympic Games, taking place in 2024.
February 20, 2020: publication of the “Gendnotes” decree (read our article here). It authorized the use by police of a mobile application that facilitates the collection of photos and other sensitive information as well as transfering them to external files (such as the Traitement d’antécédents judiciaires or TAJ (Criminal Record Processing) , which allows facial recognition). By challenging this law, together with other associations, before the French administrative High Court, we managed to keep in place the ban on information transfer to other files (our reaction here);
March 29, 2020: publication of the DataJust decree, enabling the Ministry of Justice to collect personal data from court decisions to develop an obscure predictive justice algorithm. We challenged the decree but the High Court rejected our appeal in late 2021. At the beginning of 2022, however, the Ministry announced that the project would be abandoned;
April 1, 2020: Previously used on a smaller scale at several demonstrations, the national police illegally deploy drones all over the country to monitor compliance with the confinement. We succeeded in having the Paris police prefecture condemned twice by the High court, before the CNIL and later the Constitutional Council stepped up to prohibit their use by the government. Drones will nevertheless come back to the fore in a new text in 2022 (see our article on the subject);
April 9, 2020: the Interior Ministry decides to expand a decree which already permits the collection of traffic offense information (ADOC for “accès au dossier des contraventions (Access to Traffic Offenders’ Records)”) to include all offenses punishable by a fixed fine for a retention period going from 5 to 10 years. We made a case against this extension before the Administrative High Court (our plea was rejected at the end of 2021);
May 11, 2020: enactment of the law “extending the public health emergency and adding provisions to it”. This text increases health surveillance and allows the government to set up a system of census and tracing of contaminated people through two databases, the SIDEP file and Contact Covid;
May 29, 2020: the government approves by decree the launch of the COVID-19 tracking application: StopCovid. Upon installation on a mobile phone, the program utilizes Bluetooth technology to track infected people and automatically alert those they have been in contact with. We send parliamentarians our reasons for rejecting this dystopian project (Read our article here);
June 24, 2020: the law on hateful content on the Internet (known as the “Avia law”) is enacted. With strong support from the government, the bill initially aimed to impose strikes censoring “hate” content within 24 hours and “terrorist” content within one hour. It also delegated major regulatory powers to the CSA (see our summary here). But the Constitutional Council censored a very large part of the text to leave only a few minor provisions. Several provisions will nevertheless be found in other texts such as the European regulation of terrorist censorship and the so-called “Separatism” law (see below);
July 6, 2020: appointment of Gérald Darmanin as Interior minister. After having intensified surveillance by the tax authorities when he was Minister of Public Action and Accounts, his arrival at his new office on Beauvau Square marks an additional tightening of the security screws;
July 30, 2020: adoption of the law “to protect victims of domestic violence” (see our article here). Article 22 (formerly article 11) imposes age verification devices (and thus forced identification) to sites hosting pornographic content to prevent minors from accessing it;
October 13, 2020: a Senate report reveals that in 2019, the police used “Criminal History Processing” data more than 375,000 times for facial recognition purposes. We filed a compaint against the existence of such a database in August 2020;
November 16, 2020: the Interior Ministry publishes a white paper on internal security. This document unveils the securitarian intentions for the years to come: carry surveillance and population control by the police into a new technological era (we talk about it here);
December 2, 2020: 3 decrees are published that extend and aggravate the PASP, GIPASP and EASP databases (our article here). These databases make the massive filing of political activists and their entourage easier, by extending surveillance to social networks, demonstrations, and political “opinions” (no longer just political “activities”). Alongside other associations, we challenged the texts as a matter of urgency, before the Administrative High Court and lost a first battle in January 2021. In December 2021, the High Court eventually voided some parts of these databases, mostly those related to political opinions;
December 24, 2020: adoption of the so-called “small intelligence law” (our article here). The government has urgently passed it to expand measures voted in the past: experimentatal security measures adopted in 2017 (measures strengthening internal security and the fight against terrorism: closures of places of worship, administrative searches …), and the extension of the network surveillance by algorithms (or black boxes) voted in 2015 ;
December 29, 2020: enactment of the finance law for the year 2021. In an amendment that was not debated, the agents in charge of fraud at Pôle Emploi (Unemployment Office) are given the possibility to obtain from banks, energy suppliers and telephone operators any information necessary to detect “fraudulent situations”. (We talk about this social surveillance here.)

2021

“Datakalab” decree

mask detection software on public transportation

an article

analysis article co-authored by one of our members

March-April 2021: in the context of our litigation against the mass surveillance implemented by the French intelligence services, the government, backed into a corner by the European Union Court, asks the Conseil d’ État (Administrative High Court) to derogate from European Union law in order to violate our fundamental freedoms (we talk about it here);
April 29, 2021: adoption in the European Parliament of the anti-terrorist censorship regulation (see our reaction here). With the adoption of this text, pushed by French government, all Internet content providers will now have to censor any item that an administrative authority (and not a judge) has qualified as “terrorist” within an hour under penalty of heavy sanctions. The Constitutional Council had censored the same provision in its decision on the Avia law a year prior;
May 25, 2021: enactment of the “Global Security” law. Like it did with the Avia law, the Constitutional Council stepped in to censor many of the initial provisions featured in the government’s proposal (see our article), as a result of commitment and pressure from activists. No drones nor surveillance helicopters were allowed, but more power was granted to police and RATP/SNCF (transit and rail companies). Particularly in terms of video surveillance, with real time transmission of images from police body-cams to a command center to be possibly treated and used by police officers. As with the earlier Avia law, several of the rejected provisions will be included in other texts soon afterwards.
May 31, 2021: The law “relative to the management of the exit from the health crisis” is enacted. This text, embodying the authoritarian orientation of crisis management and the rejection of any attempt at dialogue and respect for the unvaccinated, sets up the health pass, which will be officially launched in June 2021, and then extended to more and more areas by various subsequent reforms.
July 30, 2021: the act on the prevention of terrorism and intelligence comes into effect. In the first place, this text perpetuates and extends the reach of “black box” telecommunications surveillance systems. Moreover, it confirms the generalized obligation to retain connection data, which contradicts a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union. It also allows the surveillance of satellite communications as well as facilitating exchanges between intelligence services and towards other state services. Finally, it intensifies the obligation of electronic communications operators and providers to cooperate with the state (see one of our articles here).
August 5, 2021: enactment of the law extending obligation to use the Digital COVID Certificate (“pass sanitaire”) to gain access to many everyday activities;
August 24, 2021: enactment of the law on “separatism” (renamed “law reinforcing respect of Republican principles”). Among other freedom-restricting provisions (including an updated version of Article 24 of the “Global Security” law), the text gives the administration new powers to regulate large platforms and to fight against so-called “hateful” content (see our article here);
October 26, 2021: enactment of the “loi de lutte contre le piratage audiovisuel”, a law which aims to combat audiovisual piracy. This text merges the CSA “Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel” (an institution regulating electronic media) and the HADOPI “Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Œuvres et la Protection des droits d’auteur sur Internet” (an agency supervising compliance with copyright laws). They now form the ARCOM “Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique” (Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication). The law strengthens the powers given to the administration in terms of free sharing of audiovisual works. From now on, websites that appear to be illegal (we talked about it here) can be blocked faster.

2022

January 24, 2022: enactment of the “criminal responsibility and internal security law”. It allows the national police to deploy surveillance drones across the territory, despite multiple censures by the Conseil d’État (French administrative High Court), the CNIL (National Committee on computing and liberties) and the Conseil Constitutionnel (Constitutional Council). The law also enables video surveillance in police custody cells and on-board cameras on police vehicles. (Here is our reaction to this new stage of mass surveillance.)

Over the last five years, our work has not been easy and the political context does not bode well for the future. To help us continue, you can – if you are able – help us by making a donation here.

This article was translated by our volunteer group. Warm thanks to them all <3