[Infowarrior] - France Announces Massive Internet Surveillance by ISPs

[Richard Forno]

November 26, 2007
France Announces Massive Internet Surveillance by ISPs

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000331.html


Greetings. In a breathtaking act of arrogance reminiscent of the heyday of
Louis XVI (and likely to trigger similar public reactions among many
Internet users, though perhaps unfortunately absent the "equalizing"
influence of la guillotine), the French government and its overseers (the
entertainment industry), along with a cowering collection of gutless ISPs,
have announced an agreement for ISPs to become the Internet Police Force in
France.

Under the agreement (see below for links) ISPs will monitor users for
presumed illegal activities (read that as "file sharing") and send reports
on the accused to what amounts to an anti-piracy board.

This board could then mete out punishments as it sees fit, including
(attempted) banishment from the Internet (via what amounts to a national
blacklist).

To streamline the process, the entire procedure, as I understand it right
now, would operate -- at least initially -- on an extrajudicial basis,
without the messy intervention of courts, judges, trials, or other
post-Magna Carta niceties that might help to assure that only the truly
guilty are punished.

Proponents are arguing that this approach will avoid overly severe judicial
judgments, but in reality it's clearly an attempt to avoid fixing broken
laws, while kowtowing to entertainment industry demands.

The utter idiocy and recklessness of this approach is pretty much beyond
description. It is ripe for privacy abuses on a grand scale, mistaken
identities, false "convictions," and a long list of other associated
problems.

On the positive side though, the plan is likely to speed widespread adoption
of encryption, as even routine Internet communications move to secure and in
some cases cloaked channels to avoid these kinds of repressive enforcement
regimes.

It's one thing to use the conventional legal system to enforce legitimate
intellectual property rights, but it's something wholly different to
deputize ISPs into Network Monitors, feeding data to what apparently could
easily become a Star Chamber operating outside the normal bounds of the
conventional legal system.