[Infowarrior] - French LOPPSI Bill Adopted: The Internet under Control?

[Richard Forno]

French LOPPSI Bill Adopted: The Internet under Control?

Submitted on 09 February 2011

Paris, February 8th 2011 – Yesterday afternoon, the French Parliament voted the LOPPSI bill whose 4th article1 enables administrative censorship of the Internet, using child protection as a Trojan horse. Over time, such an extra-judiciary set-up will enable a generalized censorship of all Internet content. Consistent with Nicolas Sarkozy projects for a “Civilized Internet”, administrative censorship of the Internet opens the door to dangerous abuse while leaving pedophiles and pedo-pornography to prosper.

The National Assembly and the Senate have definitely adopted the ultra-securitarian LOPPSI bill, notably its 4th article which implements administrative filtering of the Internet in the guise of fighting online pedopornography. However, blocking access to websites will not prevent in any way criminals producing and distributing these contents to thrive2. This is a false pretense to legitimate administrative filtering of the Internet, and to deploy a technical infrastructure for censorship. Nobody will be able to control the way these filtering processes are set up, not even a judge, and it will be impossible to file a complaint given the fact that the blacklist will be kept secret.

As the recent Tunisian and Egyptian events have shown, the role of Freedom of Speech on the Internet is vital to democracy. In both countries, these events have also shown how ineffective targeted filtering is. In Egypt, the ongoing ineffectiveness of filtering pushed the regime to to kill all access to the Internet, a measure on which it had to backtrack a few days later on its own accord. La Quadrature du Net is outraged to see the Parliament follow — though for other reasons — the same absurd and dangerous path.

http://www.laquadrature.net/en/french-loppsi-bill-adopted-the-internet-under-control