“All watched” on Arte: “Beware of this all-security society that is emerging!”

With “All under surveillance: seven billion suspects”, his chilling investigation broadcast on Arte this Tuesday, April 21, director Sylvain Louvet warns us against the development of increasingly intrusive technologies. Tools that endanger our freedoms. And the current pandemic is not helping matters. Interview.

In All watched: seven billion suspects, his formidable documentary on the trivialization of technical devices ever more predatory of our freedoms, the director Sylvain Louvet compares the security risk, invisible, permanent, fueled by politicians and industrialists, to a virus. While the Covid-19 weakens the bodies at the same time as the immune defenses of our democracies, his film becomes strangely prophetic: not only is surveillance everywhere, but everyone can now see it materializing in their intimate environment, in the name of the 'health emergency.

This industry, whose weight is estimated at forty billion dollars, has a particularity: it fears light, and in the dark, still prefers opacity. Particularly prized by authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, the most intrusive technologies are now making their way into our Western democracies, in the name of an unquenchable hunger for security. In our latitudes, elected officials congratulate themselves by repeating the promises of the commercial brochures with which they are watered; in China, the new epicenter of technological innovation, this new arsenal reinforces a little more an ever tighter police grid. Including against journalists who are a little too curious.

Your film navigates between France and China, via Israel. How do you tackle a subject as elusive as surveillance? Sylvain Louvet: I had already been to China several times, and I had been able to observe the extent to which Xi Jinping seeks to export his know-how in terms of social control, notably through this doctrine of the new silk roads, digital version. When he transformed Xinjiang, this predominantly Muslim region, into a life-size laboratory of surveillance, I thought to myself that there was material for a film.

We mistakenly believe that it is a distant horizon

But I was interested in leaving home, to show that a real fundamental movement is underway at the global level. Seeing the flourishing of facial recognition experiments in France, emotion detectors in Nice, suspect sound sensors in Saint-Étienne, I wanted to alert the public to this emerging all-security society. It is mistakenly believed to be a distant horizon, when sci-fi films of the 90s have never seemed so close to reality. In this model, there is no need for 300,000 agents behind computers: as in the panopticon described by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century, people modify their behavior on their own.

What characterizes this “market of fear” is the speed of its expansion, in the name of permanent innovation. Where to stop his investigation? I wrote the subject two years ago, and the investigation took about a year. There are so many examples that we could easily have made two or three films. In this technological arms race, I chose to stop at the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (Ijop), the application used by police to monitor Uighurs in Xinjiang, ranking them by degree of suspicion. to send them to re-education camps. It is, as Orwell might have described it, the textbook case of a population that is disappearing under the invasion of surveillance technologies. In my eyes, the Ijop is what is most intrusive and most draconian today.

Exactly, how were you able to shoot in Xinjiang, which is probably the most monitored region in the world?The spinning has begun Before. I wanted a press visa, which made us visible but also offered protection. I said I wanted to make a film about artificial intelligence and its use for security purposes. I had to be invited by Chinese companies; I was asked about my background. After the first week of filming, we started to be followed by the police, after filming a state building in Rongcheng, southeast of Beijing. We were photographed by officials, and from there, we weren't let go. Officers were sleeping in the parking lot and in the hotel lobby. We saw the police come out of our rooms, we were stopped in the street and we were finally asked to leave the area, filing us on the plane.

“In Xinjiang, a tenth of the population was deported to a camp, it is a real cultural ethnocide”

We resumed filming in another region, we were followed again, and when we arrived in Xinjiang, it got tighter. As I had a little experience of sensitive areas, in particular because I investigated the Turkish secret services, I immediately set up a rather special backup system to protect our images. In Xinjiang, Uyghur citizens are keen to speak out about what is happening. A tenth of the population was deported to a camp, it is a real cultural ethnocide, everyone has a locked up relative. But, at the same time, a lot of Chinese people don't even know what's going on there, because they're being told it's an anti-terrorism policy.

Is it possible to collect testimonies under these conditions? In the film, your driver mysteriously disappears…We thought we were safe inside the car. After his disappearance, we were told that he was questioned by the police, but that he was fine. However, a few weeks later, all our interlocutors deleted us from the list of their contacts on Chinese social networks. We had to make sure that the people we met were well aware of the risk. For example, we have forbidden meetings in cafes or other public places, infested with cameras. We also minimized the risks by staying a week on site, so as not to attract too much attention.

When you are a Western journalist over there, you are radioactive, and we had to choose a Chinese-speaking fixer who did not have Chinese nationality, so as not to put him in danger. It was difficult until the end, since the authorities summoned us to the police station an hour and a half before taking the plane. We told them we had the right to leave; I slipped the memory card into my sock, we jumped in a taxi, heading for the airport.

“Like a virus, the fear of attacks is spreading”, says the voiceover at the start of the film. How do you view the pandemic and the risk it poses to our freedoms? that we face today. The outbreak of this pandemic really echoes my film because it is happening exactly what is described in it.

“The pandemic is an even more powerful lever than the risk of terrorism”

The pattern is always the same: States justify surveillance devices by the need to protect citizens from a threat. These are deployed on a derogatory or preventive basis. However, as soon as an attack or a virus arises, the lock jumps and the technologies are generalized. We saw it with the Patriot Act in the United States after September 11, or with the state of emergency in our country. Membership is done through fear, and what I find terrifying is that the pandemic is an even more powerful lever than the terrorist risk. It is enough to see how ready the French would be to accept the installation of an intrusive application to get out of confinement.