“Let the children know clearly that we are going to blow up the accounts,” Eric Dupont-Moretti, Minister of Justice, warned on July 1, about the Snapchat accounts that called for violence during the riots. Two months later, 2,700 videos of arson or looting of businesses were published in Pharos, leading to 32 arrests, according to information from Franceinfo.
The platform for harmonization, analysis, cross-reporting and targeting of reports (Pharos) allows any Internet user to report illegal content published on the Internet for various reasons. Applications are processed by the police and gendarmes.
Schools, public structures or even shops looted and burned, numerous videos have filmed these acts. Through videos posted to social media, including Snapchat and TikTok, and then flagged, 32 people were identified. Among them, some have already been subjected to electronic bracelets or sentenced to prison terms. In total, a hundred investigations have been opened, says Franceinfo.
Identify the authors
The judicial authority may, upon request, request the platforms to provide the IP addresses of the authors of the videos. The idea is then “to reach the identities of those who say where, when and how we are going to break”, explained Eric Dupont-Moretti in July.
In addition, during the riots a special unit was mobilized to identify the perpetrators of the violence. Some fifty gendarmes and a dozen reservists were summoned by the Cyberspace Gendarmerie Command (ComCyberGend) to anticipate calls to commit acts of violence and capture digital evidence to identify their perpetrators.
Thus, two men, for example, were arrested on July 1 in Pas de Calais, the day after an appeal launched on Snapchat to commit abuses against public buildings and gendarmerie patrols.
Source: BFM TV
