Since November 13, 2015, the French state has become authoritarian. Since November 13, 2015, the police rampaged through several houses without judicial oversight and without any justification. This happened not once, but thousands of times. Hundreds of people have been put under house arrest. Some for political reasons (environment activists), most for religious ones (Muslims)^[1]. None were linked to terrorism^[2]. The government officially suspended human rights^[3]. Websites have been censored by the police. Politicians who dissented have been told by the government that their political career was over^[4]. And the government prepares the legal basis for a perpetual state of emergency^[5].

Les attentats du 13 novembre 2015 ont été menés par un groupe communiquant sans chiffrement après que leur coordinateur a annoncé l’attaque en février dans un magazine de Daesh^[1]. L’organisation de l’attaque n’avait rien d’exceptionnelle. Qu’elle ait pu avoir lieu révèle surtout l’incompétence des services de renseignement.

Après les attentats, la seule chose à faire pour le gouvernement était d’exiger la démission des personnes responsables de ce “naufrage historique”^[2] des services de renseignement. Il ne l’a pas fait.

In the past decade, the European Union has failed every test it was put to. It failed at providing citizens with freedom of movement, it failed at gaining popular legitimacy, it failed at ensuring the future of the euro and it might fail at keeping peace. More broadly, the foundations of the European project designed by Jean Monnet in the first half of the 20^th century have gone. The EU failed at providing Europeans what it promised, but this failure should not be seen as a failure for Europe.

From acquisition to actual use, the value chain of data is often compared to mining. Raw data are the ores, to be extracted from mountains of documents or painstakingly collected from streams of information. Data is then refined, repackaged in big data smelters. At the very end of the chain, data is beautified in visualizations that can be consumed by the end-users.

This metaphor does work for certain uses of structured data. Vehicle registration data, for instance, is collected by the administration. It is then sold, in bulk, to companies that repackage it and sell it forward to statisticians within insurance companies or car manufacturers. They, in turn, use it to run the analyses that hopefully will raise the bottom line of their employers.

Just who is responsible for climate change? Big Oil? SUV drivers? Everyone? Are some people more responsible than others? I try here to imagine what could the legal reasoning be if a special tribunal were ever set up to judge those responsible for climate change.

Most of the intellectual debate on the issue assigns responsibility to entire groups, rather than individuals. In his Laudato Si encyclical ^[1], Pope Francis blames governments, corporation and humans in general for climate change (even if he makes clear references to richer countries, especially the United States). Others tried to compute responsibility at the country level. In a widely cited paper ^[2], Prof. Dale Jamieson uses car ownership as a proxy to rank countries, for instance. Greenpeace went further still and assigned a measurable amount of responsibility to different energy companies ^[3], but not to consumers. Chancel and Piketty go farthest and estimate gas emissions at the individual level, but take revenue as a proxy, not actual actions.^[4]

Ever since the term entered the European media space in 2009, students or fellow journalists regularly ask me to define datajournalism. Let me try to do that here.

Datajournalism ^[1] means doing journalism with data. Data, in turn, is simply a piece of information from which to derive facts (in latin, datum is what is given, in opposition to factum, the knowledge one obtains from data) ^[2]. A fact cannot be wrong or it ceases to be a fact. A piece of data, on the other hand, can be true or false, it remains data.

During the summer of 2015, European governments hit hard against journalists. In Germany, Netzpolitik was almost charged with high treason. In Turkey, censorship of Twitter was stepped up, while Russia banned (and quickly unbanned) Wikipedia. The French Patriot Act entered into force.

While branches of power 1 and 2 (executive and legislative) have a long history of attacking free speech, branch number 3 (judiciary) has long been Europeans’ best defense. Things are changing, and fast. Judges are taking the wrong view on what information is in the digital age. New rulings threaten to set European journalism back by a decade.

This is an extended version of a short talk I gave at Newsgeist (video below), a Google-organized gathering of media executives at Helsinki in May 2015.

A story of horses

On January 16, 2013, British newspapers lead with a shocking discovery: There’s horse meat in Tesco burgers! Two weeks later (Feb. 8), the French media, who had so far mocked the British horse-eating aversion, announce that traces of horse meat were found in Findus lasagna. Horreur! One month after the British started it (Feb. 22), Germans see in the Tagesschau that Aldi’s Rindergulasch contains horse meat, too. Ungläublich!

Upon a recommendation by the always well-inspired Caroline, I recently read Dani Rodrik’s 2012 The Globalization Paradox. In it, Rodrik makes the case for a pragmatic trade policy. Governments should not accept free trade as an end in itself, he writes. Instead, they should use tariffs as a means to develop their country and renounce free trade when needed. This argument is exactly the one made by Friedrich List, a German-American economist of the first half of the 19^th century, whose National System of Political Economy is a great critique of Adam Smith’s theses ^[1].

As I was doing research on the definition of journalism by the European Court of Human Rights, I found a ruling from 21 July 2015 which has tremendous implications for the future of journalism in Europe.

Out-law.com, the only media outlet that covered the ruling, summarizes the case as follows ^[1] (emphasis mine):

[A Finnish company] has been publishing Veropörssi magazine since 1994, giving information about Finnish people’s taxable income and assets – information that is publicly available under Finnish law.