“We are going to blow up the accounts.” After several nights of unrest, the warning from Justice Minister Eric Dupond-Moretti seemed clear: now that many rioters are going to court, authorities intend to track down rioters through their Snapchat or Tik accounts. Tok. Tools widely used to disseminate videos of violence or looting and, to a lesser extent, to collect.
Transmission of the IP address
To investigate, the police relies in particular on the Central Office for the Fight against Crimes Related to Information and Communication Technologies (OCLCTIC). An organization that is authorized to notify platforms of any “patently illegal” content, but also to submit legal requests for identifying information from an Internet user.
Contrary to popular belief, users of social networks do not benefit from anonymity, but from a simple pseudonym: it is still possible to identify them through their IP address, associated with their mailbox and therefore with their internet contract.
In fact, the authorities send a judicial request to the platform, in order to obtain the IP address of the account holder to be identified. This IP address is then provided to Internet service providers, who share the subscriber’s name attached to this box.
An operation that has made it possible on many occasions to identify and then condemn the perpetrators of reprehensible acts, for example in the case of the harassment of personalities such as Eddy de Pretto or the singer Hoshi.
goodwill platforms
But still very often, the authorities depend on the goodwill of platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter or Facebook, which have in common being based abroad. For European users, their seats are divided between Ireland and London.
A comment that refers to the fact that a foreign platform cannot be forced to respond favorably to a judicial request from the French authorities.
With Tech & Co, the deputy for the majority Eric Bothorel, particularly interested in digital issues, evokes another difficulty, much more pragmatic.
This lack of obligation to cooperate from Snapchat or TikTok led the Government to put pressure on them: their representatives were thus received this Friday, June 30, at the Ministry of the Interior. With the key, the objective of “putting pressure” on these platforms, as the Minister of Digital Jean-Noël Barrot recalled on July 4.
Source: BFM TV
