Thursday’s terror attack in the French city of Nice will be read as a national tragedy but also as a failure of the local mayor’s high-tech security strategy.
At 8.30am, a man armed with a knife attacked people inside a French church and killed three, prompting the government to raise its security alert status to the maximum level hours before a nationwide coronavirus lockdown.
Labelled by French media as "security obsessed", the 65-year-old Mayor of Nice Christian Estrosi has boasted for years about his state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, which have turned Nice into the country’s "most watched" city.
Today there are 3,800 cameras deployed across the city which according to spokesperson for the the local Town Hall are designed to make the human eye "more efficient".
But for some, today’s events illustrate the city’s residents have sacrificed their privacy for no real gain.
"This tragedy proves once again that security technologies like video surveillance do not protect us us at all from the risk of terrorism," says Laurent Mucchielli, a French sociologist who lives locally and has studied the spread of algorithmic policing across the south of France.
"Again the Safe City comedy proved to be just useless security-wise," says Emmanuel Aguera, who also lives in the city and works for the French League of Human Rights (LDH).
But the mayor is using yesterday’s events to rally against restrictions placed on his city’s surveillance network by France’s data privacy regulator, the CNIL.
"We have developed artificial intelligence and facial recognition but because of the dusty institution that is the CNIL, successive governments keep telling me we cannot use facial recognition," he told French radio station, Europe 1, in an interview today.
As France struggled to contain a series of serious terrorist attacks which started in 2015, Estrosi responded by courting French technology companies selling "safe city" software, encouraging them to come to Nice to test their products and spending millions in the process.
After the first Charlie Hebdo attack back in Paris in 2015, Estrosi made a bold claim: such an attack would never have happened in Nice thanks to his city’s superior CCTV.
"[Nice has] one camera for 343 inhabitants [whereas] in Paris, there is one for 1532," he said, speaking in French parliament. "I am more or less convinced that if Paris had been equipped with the same network as ours, the Kouachi brothers [who killed 12 people] would not have passed three crossroads without being neutralised and arrested".
That comment haunted him in the aftermath of the Nice truck attack which killed 86 people.
Christian Estrosi, Mayor of Nice
Credit: AFP
Aguera from the French League of Human Rights (LDH) says, the Nice truck attack was proof cameras don’t prevent bad things from happening: "[The driver] passed 11 times under cameras during the week preceding the event."
Estrosi, however, doubled down in response, suggesting to daily newspaper Le Parisien if cameras had been equipped with facial recognition the situation could have been different.
Residents had their doubts. Those who already felt queasy about the level of surveillance in the city started to ask, what is the purpose of so-called "safe city" technology, if it does not keep the city safe?
Back in January, Nice resident Laetitia Siccardi, who has campaigned against facial recognition and biometrics being deployed in her child’s school, told The Telegraph she was skeptical of the mayor’s attitude to technology. In 2019, Nice became the first French city to trial facial recognition.
"If there’s a terrorist attack, it won’t be stopped by facial recognition," she said at the time.
A test-bed for safe-city tech
Since the 2016 truck attack, Nice has transformed itself into a test-bed for companies promising to make the city safer. Locals say this development is linked to an ambition to turn the nearby technology park called Sophia Antipolis into the "French Silicon Valley".
Last year, the French company Thales described the city as a test-bed for new technology. "The city of Nice is becoming the pilot of safety in France by initiating full-scale tests to demonstrate what is supposed to happen in laboratories." an article on its website says.
In 2018, the city launched a "safe city experimentation project" in partnership with a series of French surveillance and biometrics companies and led by Thales, which enabled them to come and test their technologies "in real conditions" in Nice while receiving feedback from local authorities.
For residents, the only obvious change arrived in the form of new dome-shaped security cameras that towered over the beachfront or busy wide-open boulevards.
Instead, these experiments mostly take place behind the scenes, in an "urban supervision" centre located next to a statue of Charles de Gaulle.
Documents obtained by digital rights group La Quadrature du Net reveal how this office is where algorithms crawl through camera footage, trying to understand what is happening in real-time, sending alerts to officers if it detects suspicious packages or crowds gathering.
There are almost 4,000 surveillance cameras in Nice, France
A report released this year by France’s National Association of Video Protection, said experiments were underway to enable cameras to automatically detect violent events in transport, pursue individuals or analyse emotions.
Estrosi’s bet on surveillance will act as a warning to other cities that safe city technology is not fool-proof, despite the promises of its manufacturers.
"Technology isn’t fail safe," says Steven Feldstein, author of the AI global surveillance index, published by US think-tank Carnegie Endowment. "Unless there’s a willingness to go all the way in terms of implementing really intrusive omnipresent surveillance capabilities — which, with the exception of places like China rarely happens, theres’ a lot of a seams that people of bad intent can take advantage of in open societies."
Feldstein adds, the answer isn’t to double down and create a surveillance state but instead to weave technology together with other ways to build a society that is resilient to terrorism.
A paper published by French university SciencesPo warned that safe city technologies can divert resources and attention away from traditional, more time-consuming efforts to squash terrorism.
"No one will ever be able to monitor and control everything," says the sociologist Mucchielli. "The real prevention of terrorism lies elsewhere, in social prevention on the one hand, and in police intelligence work on the other."
The town hall in Nice did not reply to a request for comment.
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