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GABRIELLE VOINOT

The creepiness of increased surveillance for Nano has personal repercussions. He grew up in Albania, which vacillated between different political regimes in the 1990s. His father, a politician, opposed the party that was in power for some of that time. “It was a very difficult time for us because we were all being watched,” he says. His family suspected that the authorities had placed bugs on the walls of their home. But even in France freedoms are fragile. “France has lived in a state of emergency for most of the last five years,” he says. “I saw more and more restrictions being placed on our freedom.”

Concerns were voiced across the country. But its surveillance offering met with particular resistance in Marseille, France’s second largest city. The stormy, unruly Mediterranean town sits on some fault lines running through modern France. Known for its trendy bars, artist studios, and startup centers, it’s also notorious for drugs, poverty and criminal activity. It is stranded in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, a region with one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe but leaning towards the far right. The city is taking a step back. His demeanor can be summed up in the graffiti you might pass by while driving on the A7 motorway: “La vie est (again) belle”

All this makes Marseille a curious testing ground for surveillance technology. When President Emmanuel Macron visited the city in September 2021, 500 more security cameras will be submitted to the city council. They would be placed in an area of ​​the city that was home to large numbers of immigrants and became synonymous with violence and gang activity. He called out in a regular tone: “If we don’t succeed in Marseille, we won’t have any success in France.”

The announcement was just the latest in a series of developments that showed an increasing reliance on cameras in public spaces in Marseille.

Activists respond by highlighting the overreach and poor performance of the current surveillance system. Their messages seem to resonate. In 2020, the city elected a new administration that promised a moratorium on video surveillance devices. But have the inhabitants of Marseille succeeded, or are they battling a rising tide?

Technopolis, a campaign and activist network Launched by the digital rights advocacy group La Quadrature du Net in collaboration with other groups, it started in 2019. Felix TreguerAn adjunct researcher at the CNRS Center for Internet and Society was one of the people behind the campaign. He had been seeing a growing number of articles about new surveillance projects in the French media and was surprised at how uncritical they were. “[One] He reshaped the press release of the Marseille council,” he says.