As she walks towards Marseille’s central station, Eda Nano points to what looks like a lamppost in the Rue des Abeilles. The long foot curves at its top, where is attached a white dome housing a dark colored bulb. In fact, this elegant piece of street furniture is not a lamppost, but a CCTV camera that allows a 360-degree view of the alley.
Eda Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make Marseille residents more aware that they are being watched. She is part of a group called Technopolice which organizes different actions to map the rise of video surveillance. With some 1,600 cameras installed in the city, there is plenty to do! Among these, there are also, according to Eda Nano, about fifty cameras “intelligent”, designed to detect and report suspicious behavior, but it does not know exactly where they are or how they are used.
Around the world, CCTV cameras have become an integral part of the urban landscape. Many Chinese cities have very dense networks. London and New Delhi are not lagging behind.
Today, France is trying to catch up. Since 2015, the year of the Bataclan terrorist attack, the number of cameras in Paris has quadrupled. The police have also used this type of device to enforce containment measures during the pandemic and to monitor demonstrations, in particular those of “yellow vests”. A new national security law, passed last year, authorizes the police to carry out video surveillance by drones during events such as demonstrations or parades.
Freedoms are fragile
For Eda Nano, this increasingly insinuating surveillance evokes memories linked to her personal life. She grew up in Albania, when the country was about to switch to another political regime in the 1990s. Her father, a politician, opposed the ruling party. “It was a very difficult time for us, because we were all watched”, she says. His family suspected the authorities of installing bugs in the walls of their home. But even in France, freedoms are fragile.
“For the past five years, France has lived most of the time in a state of emergency, and I have seen that our freedom is subject to more and more constraints.”
While this is raising concerns across the country, the rollout of CCTV is meeting particular resistance in Marseille, France’s second-largest city. This turbulent and rebellious Mediterranean city is located on one of those fault lines that cross modern France. Known for its trendy bars, artists’ studios and business creation centres, it is also renowned for its problems with drugs, poverty and delinquency. With one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe, it finds itself stranded in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, a region that leans to the far right. The city fights back. “Life is (re)beautiful”, this graffiti on which we come across when arriving by car from the A7 motorway sums up his attitude well.
For all these reasons, Marseille is an interesting testing ground for video surveillance technologies. When Emmanuel Macron visited the city in September 2021, he announced state assistance to fund 500 additional CCTV cameras, which are supposed to be placed in areas of the city that are home to large numbers of immigrants and whose name evokes violence and the reign of organized gangs [les quartiers nord]. In an effort to embody order, the French president ended his speech by saying: “If we don’t succeed in Marseille, we can’t make the country succeed.”
This announcement was only the latest in a series of decisions that reflect Marseille’s increased dependence on cameras in public spaces.
But the activists, who point out the excesses and shortcomings of the existing video surveillance system, do not want to be fooled.
Defense of digital rights
This is how Technopolice, a campaign supported by a network of activists, was launched in 2019 on the initiative of an association for the defense of digital rights, La Quadrature du Net, in collaboration with other associations. Felix Treguer, c.