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Wikileaks Highlights ‘Experimental AI Video Surveillance’ Ahead of Paris 2024 Olympics

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Eddie Mitchell
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Key Takeaways
  • France passed a new law in 2023 that would legally allow it to use AI-driven surveillance technologies ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
  • Julian Assange has warned of the privacy risks posed by such systems.
  • The AI surveillance system will be in place until March 2025.

With the Paris 2024 Olympics now underway, WikiLeaks has highlighted France’s “extensive” artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance systems.

Having to introduce new laws to make the new system legal, privacy critics argue this is just one more step towards the dystopian nightmare of automated mass surveillance.

Paris 2024 AI

WikiLeaks has made note of the AI-enabled mass surveillance systems that are being implemented at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games that are largely “experimental” and place privacy-encroaching technologies in the hands of the government and private tech companies.

As per local media, algorithm-driven  “smart” cameras will scan for population density, intrusion, crowd movement, forgotten luggage, and several other “scenarios” that have been tested by the AI over several months prior to the games.

The system will support around 200 cameras in the Paris and Ile-de-France area and 11 train stations in the latter region. Furthermore, the new AI system will surveil 46 metro and RER stations with a maximum of 300 cameras.

This new system will remain in place until March 2025. It is unknown if the government will expand or discontinue the project after.

French Surveillance

French legislators passed the powered-up AI surveillance bill in 2023, which was criticized  as being “the worst technological turning point” of France in recent years. It’s worth noting that the new law explicitly rules out the use of biometric data, such as facial recognition technology.

However, critics, including Noémie Levain  of the digital rights group La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Web), say it is a concerning step toward automated surveillance. She highlights the “special security arrangements” implemented at other Olympic games over the past two decades and how they eventually became normalized.

Given that France had to introduce a new law, namely Article 7 , so that it would be legal for them to do so, this gives weight to this. There’s also a high probability that France’s mass surveillance infrastructure just got bigger.

Ultimately, the French government will continue using the experimental AI surveillance long after the Olympic Games have wrapped up.

WikiLeaks on AI

It’s no secret that WikiLeaks is anti-mass surveillance, especially the privacy-encroaching kind. Since 2006 the organization has leaked damning documents from the highest offices of government and the most secretive of agencies.

Though WikiLeaks as an organization has no explicit position on AI, founder Julian Assange shared some of his sentiments in a 2018 interview  prior to his arrest.

On the subject of AI, Assange noted that AI had made some “qualitative” changes, which might be serious threats to the “stability of human civilization,” adding:

“And the exacerbation of the commercial competition through geopolitical competition will lead to an uncontrollable desire for growth in artificial intelligence capacity, leading to very severe conflict or stultification.”

Fast forward to 2024, and we appear to be living in the nightmare that WikiLeaks exists to warn us about. With France now joining one of many mass-surveillance states implementing AI, fears that other major European Union nations could too fall under the watchful gaze of AI.

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