Piggy Soybeans !

 Here's the menu:
- soya with corkscrew tail
- peas, rare or medium
- beef cheese
If there's anything you don't like about this menu, you're probably a horrible transphobic extremist.

"SE"

 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) this month approved a biotech firm’s plan to genetically engineer soybeans to produce a “plant-grown” meat protein the company calls Piggy Sooy.

Luxembourg-based Moolec Science is genetically modifying soybeans to produce porcine myoglobin, a pig protein. The end product is a “blended meat,” which is part plant, part animal.

The company, a subsidiary of the Argentine biotech group Bioceres, is also developing a yellow pea plant that produces beef protein.

Moolec’s patented technology — which the company calls molecular farming — splices pig genes into a conventional soybean. The resulting soybeans are a pink fleshy color inside and the company claims they contain 26.6% animal protein.

Martin Salinas, Moolec’s co-founder and chief of technology, said in a press release that the approval sets the stage for another food biotech “revolution” that is “paving the way for expedited adoption of Molecular Farming technology by other industry players.”

But Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), called the technology “a nightmare in the making.”

 Hooker said:

“To reduce the complexities of porcine meat into a single protein (myosin) which is the only pork protein produced by the Franken-beans is completely myopic. This is not a pork replacement, it is a recombinant myosin production factory.

“Consumers would therefore be eating a novel substance requiring extensive testing and would require something far beyond what FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] does routinely for GM [genetically modified] food.”

John Fagan, Ph.D., co-founder, CEO and chief scientistof Health Research Institute, told The Defender there is always a very real and serious concern that there will be unanticipated and unpredictable side effects associated with GM foods.

This product is particularly concerning, he said because, “Until now most GM foods fed to humans have been a minor ingredient within a product, whereas here the GM ingredient will be the primary ingredient. So people who eat it will eat much larger amounts of GM foods than they’ve eaten in the past.”

“That means they pose a whole lot more risk,” he added.

‘What could go wrong?’

The USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), which regulates genetically modified organisms (GMOs), determined that Piggy Sooy and its progeny won’t likely pose a greater plant pest risk than regular soybeans and therefore doesn’t need to be regulated by that agency.

Moolec said the company plans to “accelerate its go-to-market strategy” now that it has approval from APHIS. However, the company may still need approval by the FDA and is going through that consultation process.

GMO experts who spoke with The Defender said their biggest concern with “blended meats” products is that there hasn’t been any human health testing on any of them.

Crop scientist and regenerative farmer Howard Vlieger said the potential danger from GMOs comes not only from the genes spliced into the plant but also from the insertion process itself, which can introduce foreign proteins that stress the human immune system.

“It wreaks havoc,” on human health, he said.

Mark Kastel, executive director of food industry watchdog OrganicEye, said he was also concerned with the lack of environmental testing.

“Once we release these GMOs into the environment, there’s no calling them back,” he said. He cited past examples with untested products, for example, DDT. Once regulators realized it was toxic, they could stop its production and application, but because it is a persistent chemical, they couldn’t get it out of the environment.

“Once GMOs are in the environment, depending on the cultivar, it can cross with other species. It can contaminate crops, non-targeted crops,” he said.

Vlieger said such products also have been shown to pose serious problems for people who may have a food allergy to the contaminants.

In this case, Vlieger and Kastel said, people may have religious or other beliefs that prohibit them from consuming the pork that could accidentally contaminate their food.

Piggy Sooy “is not soy and it’s not pork,” Kastel said. “It’s a novel food that has never been part of the human food chain. That’s a lot of experiments in one economic venture.”

“What could go wrong?” Kastel asked. “We’re opening up this can of worms. We don’t know where it will lead, maybe no problem, but we’re just kind of rolling the dice and experimenting.”

Kastel said the primary motivation was not to address any environmental issues, as the alternative protein industry claims. “It’s profit,” he said.

“What problem are they even really claiming to address?” he asked. We don’t have a shortage of pork, and we don’t have a shortage of soybeans.” And existing production processes, “as inhumane as they are,” he said, “are efficient.”

“So the problem they are actually chasing is, ‘How do we create a patented life form that can be licensed to be grown and realize a return for investors?”

Vlieger said these companies can get their products through the regulatory process easily because regulations are lax.

Regulatory agencies don’t regulate GMOs differently from regular food crops based on the principle that they are “substantially equivalent” to the non-modified product and therefore don’t need tailored regulations.

“But,” he said, “If there’s no difference between this and a different organism, why should you be able to patent it?”

The approval process is “so ludicrous that it is hard to fathom,” he added.

Farmers, food sovereignty advocates and others have long protested patents on plants and other living organisms, because they restrict farmers’ access to seeds, and their ability to experiment and research and have led to consolidation of the food industry.

Patents for genetic modification processes also often claim intellectual property rights over any seeds or plants that include the same genetic information as the products created in that process.

“It’s almost laughable,” Fagan said. “Human beings have been producing soy for at least a few centuries, if not more. And they’ve influenced probably almost every gene in the plant. And now a corporation comes in and adds one thing, and on the basis of that, they can own the whole soybean.”

Food sovereignty advocates have extensively documented how patenting food has hurt small farmers and traditional practices.

The food critic for the Financial Times, Tim Hayward, wrote in September 2021 that intellectual property rights — which can lead to windfall profits — are behind the push for lab-grown meats.

Owning intellectual property rights over meat, Hayward wrote, would give private companies the power to replace the meat that is currently consumed with a proprietary product.

Both Vlieger and Kastel said the heart of the problem in the approval process is that the industry has captured the regulators.

Tom Vilsack, Biden’s USDA secretary who also served eight years under Obama, was the former governor of Iowa. According to the Center for Food Safety, which opposed his nomination as secretary in 2021, Vilsack has long been recognized for his “aggressive promotion of genetic engineering.”

He was named “Governor of the Year” twice by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization.

He also used his authority to push through approval of genetically engineered (GE) crops with little to no scientific oversight and weakened regulations for genetically engineered crops and sided with biotech companies, “in every single public interest case attempting to halt GE crop harms or have them better regulated,” Center for Food Safety said.

Fagan said that there is also “huge lack of transparency” today concerning genetically engineered crops. Even the information shared with regulatory agencies is often inaccessible to the public because it is considered proprietary.

As a result, he said, “Consumers are rightfully highly skeptical of them [GE foods] because they have not been given any information about their nutritional value, about their safety, their molecular composition, all of those things.”

A savior for the faltering ‘alternative meats’ market?

Most lab-grown meat is made by taking stem cells from animals and placing them in large steel tanks called cultivators or bioreactors. The cells are “fed” a mixture of sugars, amino and fatty acids, salts, and vitamins to proliferate quickly. The patented processes used by the different companies vary. Some produce muscle and connective tissue in large sheets and others in big masses.

Moolec’s technology is different, but the company makes similar promises — that its technology will “overcome climate change and global food security concerns” while “creating value for shareholders and the planet,” it said.

CEO Gaston Paladini, board member and heir to the Paladini SA Argentinian meat dynasty, founded the company in 2020. He introduced his pork soybeans to the world in June 2023.

The company went public in January 2023 after merging with LightJump Acquisition Corp. At the time it was valued at $504 million and was the first molecular framing food-tech company to be publicly traded.

In October 2023 it announced it had raised $30 million to expand its molecular farming operation. It has an industrial facility in Argentina with the capacity to crush 10,000 tons of soybeans per year.

At the time, Moolec projected a $65 billion market for its products, according to an investor presentation.

In a press release this week, Paladini commented enthusiastically on the USDA approval of its Piggy Sooy product.

“Moolec embraced Nasdaq’s slogan ‘Rewrite Tomorrow’ and took it literally! We achieved an unprecedented milestone in biotechnology with the first-ever USDA-APHIS approval of this kind,” he said.

Moolec’s stock shot up by 121% on the news, but overall it was down significantly. In long-term trends, company shares traded at a record high of $20. Last week it peaked at $2.17 per share. As of Monday morning, it was back down to $1.45 per share.

Paladini ascribed this to “a mismatch between market understanding and the real opportunity,” and said the company needs more visibility to change that, Green Queen reported.

 Investors have poured billions of dollars into making “alternative meats,” either in a lab or, more recently, in plants. Investments came from venture capitals and sovereign wealth funds like SoftBank and Temasek, and major meatpackers like Tyson, Cargill and JBS, The New York Times reported.

Company CEOs boldly touted “a new era” in agriculture, and billionaire investors like Bill Gates and Richard Branson rushed to invest heavily and publicly promote several cultivated, or “lab-grown” meat companies and lab-produced meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger.

Lab-grown meat start-ups Eat Just and Upside Foods reportedly had valuations at over $1 billion each. And the USDA greenlit the sale of the first lab-grown meat in the U.S. market last year.

The enthusiasm that drew billions to the industry, however, has waned in the last several months.

Initial investor capital dried up, production has proven to be very expensive, touted environmental benefits were shown to be either mistaken or fraudulent, scientists have questioned its safety and companies have been unable to convince consumers to buy their products.

Industry leaders like Upside Foods reported earlier this year that it would pause its major factory expansion plans.

Even the Times pronounced the lab-grown meat “revolution” to be “dead,” and venture capital funding for food technology took a major dive in 2023.

Plant-based meat companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat also faltered, with many restaurants pulling the fake meat from their menus and profits plummeting after consumer scrutiny of the ultra-processed products and disappointment with the products’ taste and affordability.

Kastel said people confuse the term “plant-based” to mean healthy, but most so-called plant-based foods are highly processed, separated from the natural microbiome of the earth and none of them are organic.

Instead, he said the companies use conventional, industrial-produced agricultural materials and synthetic ingredients to create “food-like substances.”

A new report from the Good Food Institute shows that sales of vegan meat, dairy and seafood fell 26% between 2021 and 2023.

Paladini said his company’s products will be different, because they will sell the blended soy and pea products with the meat embedded in them, rather than extracting the meat, which will save on costs.

In doing so, Moolec joins a niche “blended meat” market, with several other companies, including 50/50 Foods, SciFi Foods and Mush foods, who say they are bringing together plant-based foods with cultivated meats.

These companies say cultivated meat “is not ready for prime time,” and that their products can help people eat less meat and get more people eating vegetable proteins.

Moolec, a self-described “food hacker,” has an international patent portfolio of over 25 patents that are either granted or pending.

Paladini said his products will make better-tasting “alternative proteins” by enhancing plant-based proteins with molecular material from animals. They do this by “embracing science.”

In 2025, Moolec is set to launch a nutritional oil containing gamma-linoleic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid) produced using another patented technology applied to a strain of safflower.

The FDA and USDA approved the oil, so Moolec can grow, import and move its plants across state lines without a permit.

It is also developing a bovine chymosin protein used in cheese, also greenlighted by the USDA.

Unemployed, but not without Work

 

 The broadcast of this documentary (1h12) I was unable to translate it into English, which I am really sorry.

https://www.facebook.com/100001064094952/videos/399420342860399/

Documentary initiated by a group of RSA (Active Solidarity Income) is a French social protection benefit that complements the income of destitute individuals or those with low resources, to guarantee them a minimum income.

It is as citizens that they wanted to exchange and share their experiences and reflections on the situation in which they live.

The formula surprises many as the difference is not necessarily obvious. For an employee, the two notions merge, but for someone without a job, the difference is glaring.

Everyone interviewed considers that they work, but they receive an RSA allowance because they are not employees and are therefore considered unemployed. Their reflection stems from their analysis of the social, professional, and cultural environment in which they operate, and the observation is clear: in the eyes of society, they have no job, therefore no work, making them a burden on society.

Deconstructing this process is one of the themes of the film, in addition to the notion of Employment/Work. Added to this are the specific issues faced by each individual: difficulties in speech, health problems, mobility issues, precarious month-ends, and the often challenging judgment of others. All the people interviewed are insightful, both about themselves and about the world of work and the RSA system.

Faced with these testimonies, faced with these often moving but always sincere encounters, the choice of editing will be one of sobriety. The best way to honour all these people who have had setbacks is to respect their words, their hesitations, their convictions, and their humanity.

The people who initiated this film and participate in it prove through their commitment that they are not burdens, but fully-fledged members of the society in which they operate.

SAISI

 

French Supermarkets Revolt Against "Unacceptable" Prices from Agro-Industrialists

 

Shock formulas, public denunciation of prices, and a united front against high living costs: the revolt is spreading across French hypermarkets and supermarkets. Carrefour, one of the major players, made headlines by boycotting crisps and other PepsiCo products on January 4, citing "unacceptable price increases." This move has triggered a sector-wide rebellion, just weeks before the culmination of commercial negotiations with agro-industrialists.

Carrefour, a leading food distribution giant, took a bold step on Thursday, removing popular brands like Lay's, Doritos, Quaker, Pepsi, and 7Up from its shelves in France. "We no longer sell this brand due to unacceptable price increases," declared Carrefour, with sources revealing that the delisting extends to Carrefour stores in Belgium, Spain, and Italy.

The sector-wide resistance aligns with the recent declaration of E.Leclerc's media representative, Michel-Edouard Leclerc, who emphasized challenging inflation during negotiations with industrial suppliers. The balance of power between supermarkets and major manufacturers intensifies as annual commercial negotiations, determining crucial conditions of sale, approach their end in late January.

The government's decision to expedite negotiations, ending on January 15 for smaller suppliers, anticipates that reductions in raw material costs, such as wheat and oil, will promptly reflect on shelves.

Major stores report facing demands for price increases, exemplified by Coca-Cola's assertion of a 7% average increase in November. While these negotiations unfold, distributors are taking unprecedented measures, with Carrefour leading the way. Delisting serves as a tool to apply pressure on manufacturers and demonstrate their commitment to defending purchasing power.

This strategic move by Carrefour mirrors the approach of other brands. Système U's Dominique Schelcher revealed earlier delistings, stating, "Pepsi. Not just sodas, but also chips. The blow is off." Even Michel-Edouard Leclerc acknowledged the practice, cautioning that it's a tough game, as consumers want affordable products available.

As negotiations intensify, the industry anticipates rigorous discussions. With shopping basket prices surging by an average of 20% over the last two years, supermarkets are determined to secure price reductions, even if it means wearing "boxing gloves" in the negotiations.

Saisi

Did you know that the CAF "notes" the recipients?

 

A very interesting article from La Quadrature du Net on the CAF algorithm used to "predict" who is likely or not to cheat among the beneficiaries (!).

Thus, CAF employees are no longer subject to moods when they have to deal with fraud: it is the algorithm that tells them who they should target.

Except that, as La Quadrature du Net rightly points out, the algorithm only processes data according to the program with which it was designed by human beings. So there is no such thing as a neutral, impartial, objective algorithm....

“This algorithm is interesting from this point of view since it was trained 'in the rules of the art', see the references above, starting from a database resulting from random checks. there is therefore no sampling bias a priori, as in the case of facial recognition algorithms. That being said, the algorithm repeats the human biases linked to the checks carried out on these randomly selected files (severity with people on social minima, difficulty in identifying complex fraud…) But above all, as explained in the article, it reflects the complexity of the rules for access to social benefits, which is a purely political subject that the algorithm only reveals.

La Quadrature du Net purely and simply requests the withdrawal of this discriminating algorithm from the CAF.

If you want to know more, you can contact La Quadrature du Net directly (which always does excellent, very serious work) here: contact@laquadrature.net

CAF: digital at the service of exclusion and harassment of the most precarious

Posted on October 19, 2022

For almost a year now, we have been fighting within the collective “Stop Controls” in order to oppose the effects of dematerialization and the use of digital technology by administrations for the purposes of social control. After having discussed the situation at Pôle Emploi, we are interested here in the case of the Family Allowance Funds (CAF). We will soon come back to the consequences of this fight in which we wish to fully engage in the coming months.

"Between CAF and you, there is only one click". This is what we could read on a CAF poster at the start of the year. And the subtitle leaves you dreaming: “Access to all CAF services 24 hours a day”. Vain promise of a digital facilitating access to social benefits, at any time of the day and night. Sinister slogan masking the reality of excessive computerization, a vector of calculated social exclusion.

While the generalization of online procedures is accompanied above all by a reduction in physical reception capacities, a mode of contact that is essential for people in precarious situations2, it is to an algorithm that the CAF leaves the care of predict which recipients would be “(un)trustworthy” and need to be checked3. Responsible for giving a score to each beneficiary, supposed to represent the “risk” that they benefit unduly from social assistance, this scoring algorithm serves a policy of institutional harassment of the most precarious

The Shame Algorithm

Fed with hundreds of data that CAF has on each beneficiary5, the algorithm continuously assesses their situation in order to classify and sort them, via the assignment of a score (“risk score”). This note, updated monthly, is then used by the teams of CAF controllers to select those to be subject to in-depth control6.

The little information available reveals that the algorithm deliberately discriminates against the precarious. Thus, among the elements that the algorithm associates with a high risk of abuse, and therefore negatively impacting the score of a beneficiary, we find the fact7:

– To have low income,

– To be unemployed or not to have a stable job,

– To be a single parent (80% of single parents are women)8,

– To dedicate a significant part of its income to housing,

– To have many contacts with CAF (for those who would dare to ask for help).

Other parameters such as place of residence, type of housing (social, etc.), mode of contact with CAF (telephone, email, etc.) or being born outside the European Union are used without that we do not know precisely how they affect this note9. But it is easy to imagine the fate reserved for a foreign person living in a disadvantaged suburb. This is how, since 2011, CAF has been organizing a veritable digital hunt for the most disadvantaged, the consequence of which is a massive over-control of poor people, foreigners and women raising a child alone.

Worse, CAF brags about it. Its director qualifies this algorithm as being part of a "constant and proactive policy of modernizing tools to fight against fraudsters and crooks". The institution, and its algorithm, are also regularly presented at the state level as a model to follow in the fight against "social fraud", a theme imposed by the right and the far right in the early 2000s.

How can such a profoundly discriminatory device be publicly defended, moreover by a social administration? It is here that the computerization of social control takes on a particularly dangerous character, through the technical alibi it offers to political leaders.

A technical alibi for an iniquitous policy

First of all, the use of the algorithm allows CAF to mask the social reality of the sorting organized by its control policy. Exit the references to the targeting of social minima recipients in the “annual control plans”. The latter now report “datamining targets”, without ever explaining the criteria associated with the calculation of “risk scores”. As a CAF controller said: “Today it is true that data makes things easier for us. I do not have to say that I will select 500 RSA beneficiaries. It's not me who does it, it's the system that says it! (Laughs). »12

The notion of “risk score” is also used to individualize the targeting process and deny its discriminatory nature. A CAF control officer thus declared in front of deputies that “More than populations at risk, we are talking about profiles of beneficiaries at risk, in connection with data mining”13. In other words, CAF argues that its algorithm does not target the poor as a social category but as individuals. A large part of the "risk factors" used to target recipients are, however, socio-demographic criteria associated with precarious situations (low income, unstable professional situation, etc.). This rhetorical game is therefore statistical nonsense, as the Defender of Rights reminds us:14 "More than a targeting of 'presumed risks', the practice of data mining forces the designation of populations at risk and, in doing so, leads to instil the idea that certain categories of users are more inclined to cheat”.

Finally, the use of the algorithm is used by CAF leaders to shirk responsibility for choosing the criteria for targeting the people to be controlled. They transform this choice into a purely technical problem (predicting which files are most likely to present irregularities) whose resolution is the responsibility of the institution's teams of statisticians. The only thing that counts then is the effectiveness of the proposed solution (the quality of the prediction), the internal workings of the algorithm (the targeting criteria) becoming a simple technical detail that does not concern politicians15. A director of CAF can thus say publicly: “We [CAF] do not draw up the typical profile of the fraudster. With datamining, we don't draw conclusions,” simply omitting to say that CAF delegates this task to its algorithm.

Early over-control of the most precarious

This is our response to officials who deny the political nature of this algorithm: the algorithm has only learned to detect what you have decided to target. The over-control of the most precarious is neither a coincidence nor the unexpected result of complex statistical operations. It is the result of a political choice of which you knew, even before the deployment of the algorithm, the consequences for the precarious.

This choice is as follows16. Despite CAF's communication about its new "fight against fraud" tool (see for example here, here or here), the algorithm was designed not to detect fraud, which is intentional, but indus (overpayments) in the broad sense17, the vast majority of which result from involuntary declarative errors18.

However, CAF knew that the risk of error is particularly high for people in precarious situations, due to the complexity of the rules for calculating social benefits concerning them. Thus, as early as 200619, a former director of the fight against fraud at the CAF explained that "the undus are explained […] by the complexity of the services", which is "all the more true for the services linked to precariousness (hear the social minima). He added that this is due to taking into account “numerous elements of the user’s situation which are very variable over time, and therefore very unstable”. Concerning isolated women, he already recognized the “difficulty of grasping the notion of “marital life””, a difficulty in turn generating errors.

Asking the algorithm to predict the risk of undue payment therefore amounts to asking it to learn to identify who, among the recipients, is dependent on social minima or is a victim of the conjugalization20 of social assistance. In other words, CAF officials knew, from the start of the targeting automation project, what would be the “risk profiles” that the algorithm was going to identify.

Nothing is therefore more false than to declare, as this institution did in response to the Defender of Rights' criticisms, that "the controls to be carried out" are "selected by a neutral algorithm" which obeys "no presupposition »21. Or that “the controls […] resulting from datamining […] leave no room for arbitrariness”.

Discriminate to profit

Why favor the detection of errors rather than that of fraud? Errors being more numerous and easier to detect than situations of fraud, which require the establishment of an intentional character, this makes it possible to maximize the amounts recovered from the beneficiaries and thus to increase the "yield" of controls.

To quote a former head of CAF's anti-fraud department: "We CAF, quite honestly, on these very big frauds, we can't be the leader because the stakes are beyond us, in a way." And to point out a little further on his satisfaction that in the last "objective and management agreement", a contract binding CAF to the State and defining a certain number of objectives,22 there is a "distinction between the rate recovery of undue fraud and undue non-fraud […] because the efficiency; is still more important on non-fraud industrials which, by definition, are of lesser importance”.

This algorithm is therefore only a tool used to increase the profitability of the controls carried out by CAF in order to feed a communication policy where, throughout activity reports and public communications, the harassment of the most precarious becomes a evidence of "good management" of the institution

Dehumanization and digital exposure

But digital has also profoundly changed the control itself, now turned towards the analysis of the personal data of the beneficiaries, whose right of access given to the controllers has become sprawling. Access to bank accounts, data held by energy suppliers, telephone operators, employers, traders and of course other institutions (employment center, taxes, national social security funds …)24: control has turned into a real digital stripping.

These thousands of digital traces are mobilized to feed a control where the burden of proof is reversed. Much more than the interview, personal data now forms the basis of the controllers' judgement. As a CAF controller said: “Before, the interview was very important. […] Now the control of information upstream of the interview takes on much more importance. »25. Or even, “a controller when he prepares his file, just by going to see the partner portals, before meeting the beneficiary, he has a very good idea of ​​what he will be able to find”.

Refusing to submit to this transparency is prohibited under penalty of suspension of benefits. The “right to digital silence” does not exist: opposition to total transparency is equated with obstruction. And for the most reluctant, CAF reserves the right to request this information directly from the third parties who hold it.

The control then becomes a session of humiliation where everyone must agree to justify the smallest detail of their life, as this beneficiary testifies: “The interview […] with the CAF agent was a humiliation. He had my bank accounts in front of him and went through every line. Did I really need an Internet subscription? What had I spent these 20 euros drawn in cash on? »26.

The score assigned by the algorithm acts in particular as proof of guilt. Contrary to what the CAF wants to believe, which reminds anyone who wants to listen that the algorithm is only a "decision-making tool", a degraded risk score generates suspicion and severity during controls . It is up to the beneficiary to answer for the algorithmic judgment. To prove that the algorithm is wrong. This influence of algorithmic scoring on control teams, a recognized fact referred to as "automation bias", is even better explained here by a controller: "Given the fact that we are going to control a situation strongly scored, some told me that, well, there is a kind of – even unconsciously – not an obligation of results but to say to themselves: if I am there, it is because there is something so it is necessary that I find »

Dramatic human consequences

These practices are all the more revolting as the human consequences can be very serious. Psychological distress, loss of housing, depression28: the control leaves significant traces in the lives of all controlled. As a director of social action explains29: “You have to imagine that the undue payment is almost worse than non-recourse”. And to add: “You are in a mechanism for recovering undue payments and administrations which can also decide to cut you off all access to social benefits for a period of six months. Really, you find yourself in a black situation, that is to say that you made a mistake but you pay extremely dearly for it and this is where an extremely strong degradation situation begins which is very difficult behind to recover ” .

Requests for undue reimbursement can represent an untenable burden for people in financial difficulty, especially when they are due to errors or omissions that cover a long period. Added to this is the fact that overpayments can be recovered via deductions from all social benefits.

Worse, the numerous testimonies30 collected by the Defender of Rights and the Stop Control and Changer de Cap collectives report numerous illegal practices on the part of CAF (non-compliance with adversarial proceedings, difficulty of appeal, abusive suspension of aid, failure to provide the report investigation, no access to findings) and abusive re-qualifications of situations of involuntary error as fraud. These improper qualifications then lead to the filing of recipients identified as fraudsters31, filing reinforcing à in turn their stigmatization during future interactions with CAF and whose consequences may extend beyond this institution if this information is transferred to other administrations

Digital, bureaucracy and social control

Admittedly, digital technologies are not the root cause of CAF practices. As the “social” side of the digital control of public space by the police institution that we document in our Technopolice campaign, they are the reflection of policies centered around logics of sorting, surveillance and general administration of our lives32.

The practice of scoring that we denounce at CAF is not specific to this institution. A pioneer, the CAF was the first social administration to set up such an algorithm, it has now become the "good student", to use the words of a LREM MP33, which should inspire other administrations. Today it is thus Pôle emploi, health insurance, old-age insurance or even taxes which, under the impetus of the Court of Auditors and the National Delegation for the Fight against Fraud34, are working to develop their own scoring algorithms.

At a time when, as Vincent Dubois35 says, our social system is always tending towards "fewer social rights granted unconditionally [...] and more aid [...] conditional on individual situations", which "logically calls for more control », it seems legitimate to question the major projects for the automation of social assistance, such as that of « solidarity at the source » proposed by the President of the Republic. Because this automation can only be achieved at the cost of an ever-increasing scrutiny of the population and will require the establishment of digital infrastructures which, in turn, will confer ever more power on the State and its administrations.

Fight

Faced with this observation, we ask that the use of the scoring algorithm by CAF be put to an end. The search for undus, the vast majority of which are of the order of a few hundred euros36, can in no way justify such practices which, by their nature, have the effect of throwing precarious people into situations of immense distress.

To the remark of a CAF director saying that he could not "answer precisely as to the biases" that his algorithm could contain - thus implying that the algorithm could be improved -, we answer that the problem is not technical, but political. Since it simply cannot exist without inducing discriminatory vetting practices, it is the scoring algorithm itself that must be abandoned.

We will soon come back to the actions we want to take to fight, at our level, against these policies. Until then, we will continue to document the use of scoring algorithms in all French administrations and invite those who wish, and can, to organize and mobilize locally, like the Technopolice campaign run by La Quadrature. In Paris, you can find us and come and discuss this fight within the framework of the general meetings of the Stop Controls collective, whose press releases we relay via our website.

This fight can only benefit from exchanges with those who, at CAF or elsewhere, have information on this algorithm (the details of the criteria used, the internal dissensions that its implementation may have provoked, etc.) and want us to help combat such practices. We encourage these people to contact us at contact@laquadrature.net. You can also drop documents anonymously on our SecureDrop (see our help page here).

Finally, we would like to denounce the police surveillance to which the Stop Controls collective is subject. Making telephone contacts on the part of the intelligence services, allusions to the actions of the collective with some of its members in the context of other militant actions and over-presence of the police during simple towing operations in front of CAF agencies: as many of police measures aimed at the intimidation and repression of a social movement that is both legitimate and necessary.

Saisi