Sites Featuring "Terrorism" Or "Child Pornography" To Be Blocked In France

Advocatus Diaboli writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: Now, the General Directorate of the National Police and its cybercrimes unit will be able to request that sites serving terrorist or pedophilia-related content be blocked by Internet Service Providers serving people in France and its territories. ISPs then have to comply with the request within 24 hours. ISPs will be able to request compensation from the French government for any extra costs incurred in blocking the sites. Users who navigate to a site 'to which access is prohibited will be led to an informational page from the Ministry of the Interior,' the text of the decree said. The informational page will list the grounds for the blocking as well as any possibly remedies. Every quarter, French authorities will check whether the blocked pages still contain the offending material. If not, then the authorities will contact ISPs, which will have to unblock the sites, again within 24 hours.

Comments

Blocking how?

[gronofer]

Site blocking has technical issues. If you block an IP address, you are likely to take out countless unrelated sites that happen to be on the same server. If you block the domain name lookup, there's an easy workaround that anybody who wants to visit the site can use a different name server, or use other workarounds.

Re:Blocking is counter productive

[jc42]

Blocking child pornography will mean that the general audience will not be aware of its existence, hence they will not put pressure on politicians to end child abuse. Blocking child porn is counter productive, that's a fact. This I say as one of the founders of www.meldpunt.org and www.inhope.org.

Such nonsense. There are plenty of TV shows and news that discuss child porn (e.g. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit). ...

A lot of people have also noticed the occasional reports of people being arrested for having photos of their newborn child, or for taking photos at a family gathering that included a (nearly-)naked infant wandering by in the background. The idea that there's a "slippery slope" leading to the criminalizing of all infant photos isn't quite correct; we're already at the bottom of that slope. If you're not aware or this, you might consider not taking any pictures whenever there are children in the vicinity (and it's warm enough for them to not be completely covered). Some infants can be pretty good at slipping out of their clothes and running around.

The terrorism part is also widely understood to mean "any activity that the government doesn't like at the moment". In the US, we even have the story of Senator Ted Kennedy being blocked at the airport because his name was on the government's list of terrorist. That one was funny, yes, but it doesn't take a genius to understand what that really means for the rest of us who aren't in powerful government (or industry) positions. Such programs are easily converted into tools that can be used against anyone, as was well illustrated by the victims of the "Red Hunt" back in the 1950s and 1960s.