The French National Assembly is currently examining, with the usual fast track procedure that prevents and marginalises parliamentary debate, a bill called "global security". This law, filed on October 20 by a group of MPs from the presidential party, couched in the best neoliberal rhetoric, aims to provide a new framework for security actions that its drafters promise will be "inventive and innovative".
With these two adjectives, "inventive and innovative", the legislators are probably referring to the three highly controversial articles of the proposal that concern the recording and dissemination of images in the context of police actions. Perfectly in line with the trend of the times – and by consequence, we are sorry to have it observed, with very little inventiveness and innovation – these articles impose a general surveillance for the many and a privileged disclosure for the few, as they provide for ground mass surveillance, air mass surveillance and a ban on documenting police action.
Article 21 of the law authorizes the police and gendarmes to film their interventions by "mobile cameras", to access the images they have recorded and to transmit them in real time to the command post; article 22 proposes to authorize the deployment of drones to monitor public space; article 24 proposes to prohibit the public from disseminating "the image of the face or any other element of identification of an official of the national police or of a soldier of the national gendarmerie when acting within the framework of 'a police operation' and when this dissemination is made 'with the aim of harming his physical or mental integrity' ”.
