The Olympics Have Turned Paris Into a Panopticon

July 31, 2024
By: Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff

The omnipresent high-tech surveillance introduced for the Games normalizes incursions on civil liberties.

Noah Farjon, a Paris activist with the counter-Olympics organization Saccage 2024, was about to escort two journalists through the community of Saint Denis on what they call a Toxic Tour. Saccage 2024 has organized these informational tours to show the media the impact of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics on working-class communities. Before they were able to begin, four police cars blocked them as they emerged from the Saint Denis-Porte de Paris Metro stop, and a platoon of heavily armed officers encircled them. After performing an identity check and search, the police found counter-Olympics leaflets and stickers. The gendarmes then arrested them—including the media members—and took them into custody, where they remained for 10 hours. After his release, Farjon told us that the Paris Olympics have brought on “a lockdown on dissent” and that “Paris is basically under occupation.”

Everything we are seeing bears this out. While people will remember Céline Dion’s rendition of “L’Hymne à l’Amour” at the opening ceremonies, the real soundtrack to the Olympic Games is a police siren.

Security for the Paris Olympics is the shadow spectacle to the sporting spectacle. The Games have given rise to the largest military presence in the city since World War II, with around 10,000 soldiers ensconced in a centralized military camp in close proximity to all the Paris Olympic venues. Another 45,000 police and gendarmes patrol the city, and that doesn’t even count the 20,000 private security guards.

The Olympic Games not only bring together athletes from around the world; they increasingly unite the world’s security forces. The policing of Olympic Paris includes nearly 2,000 security officials from around 40 countries. Most are from Europe, but there are also forces from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Morocco, Qatar, and South Korea. Media accounts of foreign police officers—such as Irish gardaí—offering a “friendly face” to help tourists find where they need to go belie the intensity of the security presence in Olympic Paris. Walking around the city often feels like attending an international policing convention.

In addition, an alphabet soup of US intelligence agencies have also helped prepare Paris’s policing agenda, from the CIA, FBI, and NSA, to obscure organizations like the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Overseas Security Advisory Council.

The deeply unpopular French President Emmanuel Macron and International Olympic Committee head Thomas Bach say that such measures are necessary to keep athletes and fans safe from terrorism. But that same security architecture can be turned against activists expressing their political beliefs. This is especially the case with the AI software being used throughout Olympic Paris.

In March 2023, the French National Assembly passed the Olympic Games Law, which greenlighted algorithmic video surveillance. This not only etched the technology into French law but made France the first country in the European Union to do so. Using advanced software, algorithmic video surveillance speeds up the processing and analysis of CCTV imagery based on human inputs that narrow the technology’s focus. For example, algorithmic video surveillance can be programmed to target behaviors such as people wearing all-black, individuals moving in an erratic way, or even inanimate objects on the ground.

Noémie Levain, an attorney with La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based digital rights group, told us that the Olympics were a convenient pretext for fast-tracking the technology. She said that algorithmic video surveillance is a tool for the police “to enhance social control on public space.” AI-driven video surveillance “can discriminate,” she said, both “technologically and politically,” allowing security forces to zero in on political activists, migrants, and unhoused people.

She pointed out an important “hypocrisy”: that the experimental technology has been sold to the public for use at the Olympics, but that “it started before [the Olympics] and will end [long] after.” Moreover, French policing officials have already deployed it at concerts, festivals, and other sporting events.

The Olympic Games Law also carves out political space to advance subsequent bills that include facial recognition technologies. In other words, the law, passed amid the Olympic state of exception, may well be the gateway drug to demonstrably racist technology. (Racist policing is an issue France already knows all too well.) Moreover, although the law is slated to sunset in March 2025, it does not take the imagination of Henri Matisse to conjure scenarios through which the French state will endeavor to extend the technology’s use.

Surveillance is not only being used to go after marginalized groups; the entire city is a panopticon. Surveillance technology has been used to monitor French workers hoping to earn a wage as part of the Olympic Games, from bus drivers to entertainers to first-aid providers. According to Levain, nearly a million prospective workers had their digital histories scoured before being employed, with many being deprived of employment if they were found to have attended demonstrations, been arrested at protests, or done anything that could be perceived as resistance to the French state. This was about politics as much as security.

To be clear, this is not a Paris issue as much as it is an Olympic issue. Security officials in the Olympic city have long used the Games to multiply and militarize their forces. The Games have become a high-tech playground for soft-launching invasive security technologies. This serves to normalize what should be abnormal policing practices, softening up the population for the next round of incursions on civil liberties.

Olympic boosters often defend handing the Games to authoritarian regimes because they say they are bringing democratic values to undemocratic spaces. But far from making autocracies less vicious, the Olympics are making Paris feel more like an autocracy.