French Big Brother Awards 2006

The 6th edition of the French Big Brother Awards taking place in Paris on 3
February has chosen the following in the 5 different award sections, for
causing the most damage to personal privacy.

The Orwell Award for State official – the winner was Jean-Michel Charpin,
Directeur de l’Insee (INES) for his participation in the INES project
(Electronically Secured National Identity card). By this project he created
a direct link to the Ministry of Interior Affairs ignoring the separation
between population statistics and police administration. The card will
include two biometric identifyers on a RFID chip.

The section for enterprises was won by Lidl (at close range to Carrefour)
for having installed 65 video cameras for the surveillance of 60 employees
in a store. The company has had similar policies in other countries as well.

The local Orwell Award went toArmand Deprez, the director of the
Joliot-Curoe college of Carqueiranne. He enforced a rule to obtain
fingerprints of all students. Fingerprints are necessary to enter the school
canteen, thus enabling total surveillance of the students eating behaviour.
This was necessary for “absolute transparency” as he said it.He also put the
student grades online, for parents to control, and implemented an SMS system
to inform the students they were late for classes.

The award of lifetime achievement was unanimously awarded to minister
Nicolas Sarkozy for having created an environment of fear, for having
weakened the justice’s power while increasing that of the police, for having
violated the information law and freedom with the spam for UMP, for having
extended video-surveillance and cyber-surveillance and police access to
administrative files with his third anti-terrorist law, for asking for the
expel of people with no papers including minors, for having encouraged the
fear of police forces.

The positive Voltaire award was won by Le Collectif National Unitaire de
Resistance a la Delation (The National Unitary Team of Resistance to
Denunciation) which had continued for their 3 year fight against the law on
‘crime prevention’ meant to be adopted next year which obliges educators and
social workers to denounce families and individuals showing “a risk”.

Press Release Big Brother Awards France (4.02.2006)
http://www.bigbrotherawards.eu.org/article.php3?id_article=582#winnerz