What the French 'Civilised Internet' Looks Like
lozkayepirate.tumblr.comIf this becomes reality it will seriously set back the value of the internet, its freedom of speech and privacy. It doesnt matter that it is "just" one country. Its a western country and this mindset of censorship and control by such a government worries me. Alot.
This would set a very bad precedent indeed, as other countries will later point to France as an example of how it should be done.
Sarkozy wanted to get all the G8 countries on the same page, so they don't look out of place with their new censorship laws. That way if they all enforce the same kind of laws in the same time, they think people would just take it for granted that that's how it should be done, and that "if so many countries are doing it, then it probably makes sense".
People need to speak out against such measures and be very vocal about it. Fortunately, there are elections next spring in France, so I hope the French people will vote Sarkozy down over this, and put someone in his place that disagrees with such censorship.
Americans also have an election next year, and hopefully they'll do the same (Ron Paul?).
> Fortunately, there are elections next spring
I would say you are mistaken in the belief that these policies exist because of certain leaders. In my opinion, they exist because the electorate is misguided in believing that this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea. Therefore, I would suggest that voting out the incumbent will not necessarily make the problem go away. I believe that the best way to deal with this is by spreading the counter message to show just how foolish and misguided the policies are. In addition, you should write to your government representative and let them know how you feel, ideally providing some good justifications for your argument.
> "In my opinion, they exist because the electorate is misguided in believing that this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea."
Or, a bit more cynically, they're paid to believe this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea.
A slight misunderstanding perhaps. By electorate I mean the general public who elect the politicians. As far as I know they don't get paid to have opinions, unlike some politicians in a few cases.
Huh. Well it wasn't a misunderstanding. I just completely missed what you'd written and read my own bias right into your comment.
Could not agree more... spreading the counter message is best way to deal with it.
(I'm French)
As explained in the source article on PCInpact, the proposed project has been assessed by the CNN, which is a (relatively new) consultative committee whose members include representatives from ISPs, high traffic French websites (dailymotion, meetic and deezer are on the list), a few software editors, representatives from ecommerce sellers, etc (and no music/film industry representative, for once).
Unsurprisingly, they argued against it (one of arguments is 'the EU has to be informed', which is an interesting trick to gain a few months, imo). (Can't find any non-French source for that, but it has been officially done).
What's more surprising is that they were officially asked what they thought about it in the first place. I don't think the government had any incentive to do so. What were they thinking ?
If they have any respect for the CNN (which the president created just two months ago), they will forget the law. Otherwise, they will have explicitly ignored the opinion of the ISPs. Which isn't very wise when you want to enforce filtering and blocking of websites.
This doesn't makes sense to me.
Maybe they look like tough protectors and win with their core constituency even if the CNN tells them it's impossible to enforce or implement.
Sarko is a cagey motherfucker.
Am I missing some point here? When Internet was censored in Tunisia, we would use proxies, https, sites like vtunnels... This became casual stuff even for the non-techie. So what's the point of censorship? Making access to the web a little bit harder? If you censor a video on Youtube, someone else can upload it to Facebook and watch it through HTTPS and diffuse it to many people.
Aren't (the French Gov. and other Govs.) aware of that? If so, what's the point of censorship?
>Aren't (the French Gov. and other Govs.) aware of that? If so, what's the point of censorship?
To win votes by making the population feel safe, and to funnel taxpayers' money into the pockets of dubious whitehat contractors.
They can make it a crime to access or allowing others to access censored material. Then once they have a search warrant or similar and can prove you accessed this material or helped others, you are in deep shit.
Imagine, they illegally search your friend's home, find that they accessed the material, coerce them into saying that you helped them with this and they can prosecute you. The search may not be used against your friend, but it may be used against you (IANAL). This would be very useful for suppressing opposition.
Yes, because China has been so stunningly unsuccessful in its attempts.
There will always be ways around censorship. But by making it difficult, they can prevent the majority of people from doing so. And that's enough to make a lot of changes.
Well this is the _french_ government. There is .gov sites storing passwords in plain text here.
It sets a bad precedent, and unfortunately it's not the only country to do so (or consider it). When I was younger, I had always dreamed of living briefly in France or maybe Australia at some point in my life, but both countries now see to either enforce strict censorship, or are on the verge of doing so.
I live in Canada, and it wouldn't shock me if our Conservative government did the same, but it still saddens me nonetheless.
I don't keep up on French politics/culture very much, but this move does surprise me, given their Revolutionary history.
That revolutionary history was quite a long time ago. France has a pretty conservative culture right now.
They are into their 5th republic so the revolution wasn't that long ago.
The student protestors from the 60s are now retired or (even worse) running the government and they are the ones voting on these laws. Unfortunately, Sarkozy is far more popular than I would like him to be and his biggest political rival is sitting in NYC under house arrest.
As a french citizen living in the US, I’m sad to hear that the French government is proving itself even more ridicule than it already was. Sad.
The French government has been going this way for a while now.. they also tend play heavily on the "think of the children" emotion which annoys me.
This sounds similar to the recently proposed measures by the Turkish government. Perhaps French will develop and vulgarize some tools that would also be useful in Turkey and vice versa. I think the first is more likely since the Turkish population is less tech-savvy and more importantly a lot less sensitive to the erosion of democratic rights.
For the record, I am Turkish but has been living abroad for 12 of the last 13 years (planning to go back next month!). Ironically, even though I think this is a terrible law, I hope it passes and adequate countermeasures get developed.
Yes, many citizen groups stand up for the 1st Amendment and tell our representatives that Internet censorship is not feasible in a functioning democracy. The problem is that the Big Six (GE, News Corp., Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, & CBS) have a megaphone and bags of cash... so often the voices of the citizen groups get drowned out.
Couple that with the fact that the vast majority Americans form their world view from the television or the websites that the Big Six own. Sex scandals and Hollywood gossip is discussed, Internet censorship? Not so much.
And this is increasingly not just an American problem, as many people on this thread are pointing out. We live in a global society (thanks largely to the Internet), the challenges of the U.S. are increasingly the challenges of France.
The Internet has done a tremendous amount of good over the past 20+ years, but there is a flip side to this coin as well.
Check out this five minute documentary trailer (on KickStarter) that seeks to tackle some of these Internet censorship issues:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akorn/killswitch-a-docum...
This documentary project is looking to get crowd-funded by small individual donations from the same citizens with the most to lose if we moved to a censored and centralized Internet.
VPN will become the norm. Internet access will be 30€ for the ISP + 5 € for the VPN. Not that much of a big deal for the citizen, more worrying for Paris as a tech scene.
This might work temporarily, but I argue that it is still very important to protest against this type of development, because in the long run the law will win. I for one do not want to see international communication criminalized. I still remember how out of touch my country was back in the 90s before sattelite TV and the internet. Problem is that its very profitable to create submarkets, so the pressure from the industry to implement restrictions will always be on. To break the pattern, we must fight back and try to make international communication a human right.
Interesting package deal, as the French also have a pretty stringent anti piracy law.
Other side effect, assuming that the VPN is fully encrypted and the server is in a, shall we say more liberal country, is that it will become more easy to pirate things for the average user.
There anti-piracy is more bark than anything. They basically wrote a law with little understanding of its implementation and are trying to push the cost of doing it onto the ISPs who scoffed at the idea (well Free, AFAIK).
Basically they want you to download and install some software on your PC to monitor you for piracy, to prove you're innocent. If you don't install it? You have to prove your innocent without the big brother software. Also, its Windows only. Mac, Unix, Linux are on their own.
Could this lead to a massive boost in the use of tools like Tor?
So this is what the West is tottering towards.
What can be done about it? Does an alternative internetwork need to be formed? What will it look like? How will we pay for an alternative network? Who will use it?
For those of us who really, honestly, no-kidding want free speech: what can be done from a technical angle? Thoughts?
Tor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29
Obviously you will be intimidated by the government if you run an exit node, or perhaps any tor node at all. If you're an academic with tenure, or independently wealthy go for it.
If you need to work for a living and do not have tenure, well perhaps consider helping others run tor. Or start a non-profit with the goal to promote freedom, and raise funds, and pay to install public tor terminals anywhere that's willing to host them.
Since we live in a democracy, there are elected representatives whose job it is to listen to voters. I think the best way to proceed is to put the cynicism aside and actually let them know how you feel about the issue. If you are really passionate about it, convince people around you to do the same. Quite easy really.
Intel cut France out of their map of Europe (supposedly) when France restricted encryption tech. They want a repeat.
I love the double speak about undermining the public good.
This brings to mind A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the EFF:
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
It was written in 1996 but feels more relevant as every year goes by.
Similar to how the DoHS is seizing domains, and their screwup that resulted in 84,000 wrongly seized domains.
France has borders with Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Monaco, Spain and Andorra. Plus Britain just across a channel (and connected by a tunnel).
I can't see how they could possibly achieve this.
I have never quite liked Sarkozy
"What" it looks like, what. Not how.