SIGINT Intelligence Transnational Activities and National Security in France and Europe: Transnationalisation, Oversight and the Role of Courts

This international colloquium is organized at the initiative of the ANR-UTIC for the first two days and for the third day is the result of a collaboration between Sciences Po CERI (Center for International Research) and Queen Mary University London (QMUL).
It looks at the communications surveillance practices of police and intelligence services, in particular in France but also at the European and transatlantic levels. It surveys today’s technologies for collecting and analyzing communications, the use of these technologies by law enforcement agencies as well as the political and legal controversies they trigger.
The goal of the colloquium is to examine the reconfiguration of contemporary surveillance, the way it is redefining the limits of democracy as well as state sovereignty.
To grasp the stakes surrounding communications surveillance, the project’s transdisciplinary approach relies on both Engineering Sciences and Social Sciences. The project’s supervisors are Didier Bigo at Sciences Po CERI, who is also UTIC’s coordinator, Sébastien Laurent (Centre Montesquieu de Recherches Politiques – CMRP)  and Laurent Bonelli (Université Paris Nanterre).
The different panels will examine how national security and its relationship to fundamental rights are transformed both by the global nature of Internet traffic and by the modes of cooperation developed by public and private actors involved in surveillance. It seems that communications surveillance is no longer national and public. Data collection and transfers take place at the transnational scale between different agencies from different countries, with the support of private corporations.
In this context, the first two days will analyze how are alliance systems and power relationships evolving? What is the role of public-private hybridation in this process? What happens to the reason of State when the collection and processing of data takes place on a transnational scale? How a fair and effective oversight is possible?
The third day, we will, in collaboration with QMUL,  discuss how European Courts with their judgements on right of privacy set the limits of surveillance?
These are complex questions since the actors of surveillance have conflicting interests. They also act under the constraint of multiple and sometimes contradictory legal frameworks, which are in turn shaped and mobilized by social movements attached to the protection of fundamental rights.
More information on the preliminary programs and registration:
SIGINT intelligence transnational activities and National security in France and Europe: a changing landscape (September 24, 2018)
SIGINT intelligence transnational activities and National security in France and Europe: a changing landscape (September 25, 2018)
Interrogating the Right to Privacy and the Limits of Surveillance (September 26,  2018)
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