Last Name, First Name and Middle Names: Edvige, that is Exploitation documentaire et valorisation de l'information gènèrale [Documentary Utilization and Development/Evaluation of General Information]. Nationality: French Date of Birth: June 27, 2008, by decree published in the Official Journal. Profession: Police file designed to collect information about "any physical or corporate person having sought, exercised, or exercising a political, union or economic office or that plays a significant institutional, economic, social, or religious role," but also any person above age 13 or any group or organization "likely to harm public order." Identifying characteristics: obsessive security tendencies.

    In two months, a real rejection front has developed against this database. Some 700 organizations, associations and unions, as well as 90,000 people, have signed a petition designed to block its creation. Appeals have been filed before the Government Council. All the parties on the Left, as well as François Bayrou's Modem party are now denouncing this governmental determination to create a generalized database that could rapidly involve several million French citizens.

    They are right. Of course, the government must guarantee its citizens' security. That's one of its principal missions. It's also the government's responsibility to adapt its intelligence-gathering and police functions to technological developments. In that respect, Edvige extends and "modernizes" the former General Information database in the framework of this summer's creation of a new central domestic intelligence administration.

    However, defense of the public order cannot justify such a threat to individual rights. In principle as much as out of respect for the European Human Rights Convention, the government has an at least equal obligation to protect citizens' privacy. The mobilization against Edvige is all the more justified in that this new information system covering French citizens is only the most recent: for the last several years, police files have proliferated, not to mention video surveillance. To cross over in this way from a society in which each person is presumed innocent to another in which everyone's guilt is assumed constitutes a dangerous drift for a government of law.

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    Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.