One of the most serious obstacles in the fight against what we call Technopolice is the persistent opacity surrounding the use of surveillance technologies. Today, to adress this problem, La Quadrature du Net launches Attrap (short for “Automate de Traque de Termes et de Recherche dans les Arrêtés Préfectoraux“, or “Automated Term Tracking and Search Engine for Local Administrative Orders“). It’s a search engine for local administrative orders that contributes to greater transparency in government action. This tool is intended for journalists, activists, lawyers and individuals who want to find out which surveillance and monitoring tools the government uses by quickly and easily search through a massive amount of administrative orders.
Over the last few years, the number of surveillance tools made available to public authorities has dramatically increased, along with an expansion of the powers of local government officials, known as prefects. For instance, since 1995, department prefects are in charge of granting cities or businesses permission to monitor public space with CCTV. Since 2023, they also have the power to approve surveillance drones, and since the Olympics law, they can allow algorithmic videosurveillance, first authorised in April 2024.
Prefects also have the power to impose bans or restrictions. They can ban demonstrations, open temporary administrative detention centres used to detain foreigners prior to their deportation, or, since the SILT law (which turned emergency measures into ordinary law in 2017), create “security perimeters“.
On paper, all these decisions made by prefects must be published. On the ground, though, this information is really hard to access. Sometimes, local authorities communicate on social media. But it’s the exception rather than the rule, and it’s usually limited to major events. Most of the time, all these decisions are buried deep in local administrative records.
Collections of administrative orders, a sad example of inacessibility
The collections of administrative orders (CAO) are the prefectures’ Official Journals: with the very theoretical goal of transparency, many decisions taken by the prefects must be published in these CAOs. However, this transparency is rather limited in practice: the CAOs are deliberately organised to be as hard to access as possible.
Let’s take a practical example. While visiting Antibes on the weekend of 25-26 August 2024, you noticed a surveillance drone flying over the city centre. You want to know what decision (in this case, an administrative order) authorised this surveillance in order to find out why public authorities are deploying it, for how long, and under whose supervision.
A quick search on the prefecture’s website returns no results. You will therefore need to search manually through the prefecture’s CAO. However, the CAO for the Alpes-Maritimes prefecture is split across numerous PDF files, which are themselves divided into many pages and sub-pages on the administration website. You must therefore review all the monthly, special and specific pages, and the various linked PDF files. But be careful not to open too many PDF files too quickly: you will be blocked by the website and will have to wait several minutes before you can continue! Furthermore, when using your browser’s search function on the PDF files around the date you are looking for, you will not find the term “aéronef” (the legally recognised term for surveillance drones in France) anywhere.
Finally, by searching the word “drone” in the table of contents of the PDF file regarding 14 August, you will find a small line that includes that word. When you go to referenced page, you will indeed find the administrative order you are looking for. However, you cannot select the text (and therefore search within the body of the PDF files) because the administration has only published a scanned version…
This is not the worst example, although some prefectures make their collections of administrative orders somewhat easier to access than the Alpes-Maritimes prefecture. And in our use case, we were looking for a specific order. In other words, it is impossible to conduct effective monitoring and therefore to exercise control over the orders issued by prefectures, particularly in terms of surveillance of the population.
A single interface to make collections of administrative orders accessible
To get around these practical obstacles, we created Attrap. It is a search engine that automatically crawls prefecture websites, downloads the various PDF files containing the CAOs, recognises the characters, extracts the text and makes it all available in a single web interface. From there, you can search for keywords in the CAOs of all prefectures or only certain ones, sort the results by relevance or chronologically, or perform advanced searches using the words “AND” or “OR”. This means that the surveillance drone authorisation decree in our example can be found in just a few seconds.
Even better! If you know how to code and want to develop features that Attrap does not offer (for example, statistics, monitoring, or more advanced analysis of administrative orders), you can freely use the API. This is what we used to create the Mastodon monitoring bots Attrap’Surveillance (which detects video surveillance, AVS and drones), Attrap’Silt (which detects security perimeters under the Silt law) and Attrap’LRA (which detects the creation of temporary administrative detention centres). And the source code for our bot is also free.
Empowering individuals
Attrap is a new tool for, for example, local Technopolice groups that document and monitor the development of surveillance technologies in our neighbourhoods, towns and villages. This tool uncovers and warns the public about the very things the police would like to keep hidden: the surveillance of our streets and therefore of our lives. It will also make it possible to document the future test subjects for algorithmic video surveillance (AVS) under the Olympics law, which will remain in force until March 2025.
For example, thanks to Attrap, we were able to shed light on the use of AVS this year, including filing a complaint before the CNIL when the police in Paris used this technology illegally. This tool also enabled the Technopolice Marseille group to document the massive use of drones in Marseille, particularly during the “opérations place nette” (clean-up operations), a widely publicised and heavily criticised series of police operations led by Gérald Darmanin %préciser ici qui est Darmanin, or the surveillance of the Canet administrative detention centre (an administrative order that has just been suspended by the court following a legal action initiated by the Marseille Bar Association and La Cimade, supported by the Syndicat des Avocats de France, the Syndicat de la magistrature and the Gisti).
Attrap still has some limitations. For the moment, only around thirty prefectures of departments and two prefectures of regions are supported. Adding a new prefecture takes time, as it is necessary to adapt to the way each prefecture lists its CAOs online. Also, for most prefectures, only CAOs for the year 2024 are indexed. However, Attrap’s coverage will improve in the coming months.
To improve Attrap, we are organising a hackathon during the 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) in Hamburg, Germany. If you like Python, feel free to join us! But if you can’t make it to 38C3, you can still visit our dedicated Matrix channel to start contributing! 🤓
In the future, more features will be added. In particular, we plan to add a monitoring system that will allow anybody to be notified by email of the latest search results without having to create their own monitoring robot.
With this tool, we want to empower those affected by police decisions. Starting today, you can get an overview of the most unacceptable measures that prefectures tend to bury deep in their CAOs: bans on demonstrations, videosurveillance, surveillance drones, algorithmic videosurveillance, bans on underground music festivals, police measures justified by vague social media posts, etc.
We hope that Attrap will help raise awareness of local police actions (and abuses). The opacity maintained by prefectures has just lost some ground. To help us continue our work, you can make a donation. And if you want to contribute to Attrap, visit the dedicated Matrix channel.