CCTV to be tripled in France

Story link: CCTV to be tripled in France by David Masters

The surveillance society continues, this time in France. The French interior minister, Michele Alliot Marie has announced that the government will be increasing the surveillance capabilities right across the country. In fact the figures being mentioned is that they intend to triple the existing CCTV network, which is quite an increase in surveillance capabilities.

Obviously the threat from international terrorism is the reason being used as the reason for this increase, and to back this up, the French government is intending to change the law that comes under the heading of Interior Security Orientation and Programming (LOPSI); this should come into force in autumn.

The will need to cover as much territory as possible, which would mean creating a network of systems to connect all of those who are using the same system, like ports, airports, railway, shopping centers and anyone else that they can pull into this.

This is a general operational upgrade, which will see a fully networked CCTV system, where the authorities can access the network at any time, should the need arise, like following some suspects or something like. In order to help them trace and track down their suspects, the authorities need to change the length of time that data is kept too; this should be 48 hours to a week, depending on location.

This new direction that the authorities will be taking will only cover government and local authority networks, this does not take into consideration the CCTV systems that are in private installations.