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