Après avoir passé près de 13 ans au Nouvel Observateur, j'ai rejoint Mediapart en novembre 2012. Je suis en charge des sujets liés aux libertés publiques.
Declaration of interest
In the interest of transparency towards its readers, Mediapart’s journalists fill out and make public since 2018 a declaration of interests on the model of the one filled out by members of parliament and senior civil servants with the High Authority for Transparency and Public Life (HATVP), a body created in 2014 after Mediapart’s revelations on the Cahuzac affair.
Bruno Retailleau, the new French interior minister in Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government, has, barely ten days into the job, prompted controversy over his outspoken views that “the sovereign people” should have primacy over the constitutional state which, he says, “is neither inviolable nor sacred”, while complaining that a “jungle of judicial regulations” prevent the authorities from being able to deal effectively with immigration. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports on the consternation of public law experts over Retailleau's comments.
As the Paris Olympic Games get closer – the opening ceremony is on July 26th - France's Ministry of the Interior has been stepping up at an unprecedented rate the number of administrative control and surveillance measures on those they see as potential security threats. People's jobs and even their homes are under threat as house arrest orders are placed on individuals who have never been in trouble with the law before – or not for many years. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
Since the start of the protest movement against the government's pension reforms, French police officers have been arresting more and more demonstrators over insults aimed at President Emmanuel Macron. This offence is commonly known as 'lèse-majesté' - or in this case 'lèse-Macron'. However, a decade ago the crime of insulting the president of the Republic was declared to be in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights and was removed from French law. As Jérôme Hourdeaux reports, lawyers say they are worried that the government no longer appears to tolerate criticism.
The French parliament is currently debating draft legislation on special measures the government is seeking to introduce for the Olympic and Paralympic Games to be held in France in 2024. While these contain relatively uncontroversial moves like the lifting of restrictions on Sunday shopping and tougher fines for trouble-makers at sporting events, they also include the “experimental” introduction of algorithmic video surveillance of the public, a technology that is strongly opposed by a number of rights groups and legal experts. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
French sociologist Élodie Lemaire spent 16 months alongside various different professionals involved in CCTV surveillance in a town in northern France. The result is a book that highlights both the myths and realities of video surveillance. It reveals a technology that is limited in its impact by both technical issues and power struggles between judges, the police and CCTV operators. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
The recently appointed president and nearly all of the members of France’s independent advisory commission on digital affairs, the CNNum, resigned this week in protest at the government’s move to exclude from the body outspoken feminist and anti-racist activist Rokhaya Diallo. She and another newly chosen CNNum advisor, start-up entrepreneur and rapper Hicham Kochman, also known as Axiom, were the target of a political campaign that has reignited the debate over the extent of institutional racism in France, and the stigmatisation of racial minorities in the country. In an interview with Mediapart, Kochman speaks of his despair that “if you are Black or Arab, if you come from certain neighbourhoods, however competent you might be you have no chance of succeeding”.
The influential Civil Liberties committee of MPs at the European Parliament has just agreed on a draft counter-terrorism directive for the European Union. Mediapart can reveal that the content of the text has been considerably influenced by Paris, which has been keen to include measures already adopted in France in recent years. These include a new crime of glorifying or praising terrorism, blocking access to websites and boosting the number of surveillance tools. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
In recent months politicians and some senior legal figures in France have spoken out against the practice of encryption to protect people's data, emails and mobile phone calls, claiming it hampers investigations into crime and above all terrorism. Mediapart can reveal that a policy to force companies to leave so-called “backdoors” in their software to enable the security forces to bypass encryption was close to being adopted by the French government. But the data privacy watchdog in France warns that such measures would put people's computer security at even greater risk at a time of an increasing number of cyber threats. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
French President François Hollande on Wednesday told French parliament leaders that he will seek a third extension of state of emergency powers introduced immediately after the November 13th terrorist attacks in Paris which left 130 people dead. The announcement followed two separate and fiercely critical reports published this week, one by the government’s own official consultative committee on human rights which denounced "abuses" and the "devastating damage" of the special powers the government has granted itself, and another by a panel of United Nations rights experts who said the measure had created “excessive and disproportionate restrictions”. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
Internet activists-turned lawyers are using computer and coding skills to find errors or “bugs” lurking in France's growing array of surveillance and intelligence laws. Calling themselves “amateur scholars”, they have so far drawn up around ten legal challenges as a result of their work. As Michel Deléan and Jérôme Hourdeaux report, these 'hacktivists' are in the vanguard of numerous judicial challenges to this controversial snooping legislation.
The phones of German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and those of many of his ministry staff were systematically tapped by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in an eavesdropping operation that began at least 15 years ago, Mediapart can reveal in this report in collaboration with WikiLeaks. Confidential NSA documents obtained by WikiLeaks also disclose how Steinmeier, during his first term as foreign minister in 2005, “appeared relieved” to have been spared details of infamous rendition flights operated by the US over German airspace. Jérôme Hourdeaux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report.
Earlier this month, confidential documents belonging to Italian spyware company Hacking Team were dumped on the internet after a cyber attack against the firm extracted 400GB of data from the its computers. Apart from confirming the Milan-based company’s sophisticated communications interception systems were sold to a number of repressive regimes, they also reveal how the French government had been in contact since 2013 with Hacking Team for the purchase of its flagship computer snooping software Galileo. Jérôme Hourdeaux reports.
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Le mois dernier, se tenait à Berlin la conférence annuelle de la Berliner Gazette intitulée « TACIT FUTURES ». Durant trois jours, journalistes, codeurs, hacktivistes, artistes… étaient invités à travailler sur les concepts de mouvement, de flux à la fois de personnes de biens ou d’argent, à l’heure du big data et des algorithmes prédictifs.
Comme chaque année, plusieurs associations de différents pays, ont fêté le 1er janvier la « Journée du domaine public », célébrant l’entrée dans le domaine public d’œuvres incontournables qui se trouvent, à cette date, libérées de leur législation nationale sur les droits d’auteur.
