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

Its starts with terror and kidding porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Its starts with terror and kidding porn, next comes online casinos that don't have a license from the french government, follow by online BitCoin & alternate currencies web sites the government will claim are being used to avoid paying taxes ... and not to long after that any news sites or blog that the french government doesn't agree with. A very slipper slope...

Re:Its starts with terror and kidding porn

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no provision to pay the owners of the sites that are being blocked, and 'terrorism' and 'child pornography' both have wide ranging interpretations based on whoever may be judging the content.

Basically, by this definition, the French government can arbitrarily take down almost any site it chooses to, and cause them to lose money. That they pay the ISP is inconsequential. This is a disgusting law.

Re:Its starts with terror and kidding porn

[toQDuj]

relying on the fallacy of the middle way will still get you down the slippery slope, just at half the speed!

Re:Its starts with terror and kidding porn

[IamTheRealMike]

Why is everything a slippery slope for you people? Is it not possible that we find a middle way?

Experience, and no, probably not.

Look. Let's be extremely generous and assume for a moment that the Great Firewall of France is never extended to, say, "extreme speech" or anything beyond terrorism and child porn. Judging from similar firewalls elsewhere (like in the UK) the chances of this being the case is nil, but let's pretend for a moment France is unique and doesn't slide down the slippery slope.

This still leads two gaping problems. One is that whilst the definitions of child porn and terrorist material might seem straightforward, they are not. The UN has struggled for years to come up with a tight definition of what terrorism actually is, but has never been able to succeed, partly because any obvious and straightforward definition tends to make western governments outright supporters of terrorism or terrorists themselves. So blocking terrorist material quickly becomes "we know it when we see it" which basically just means whoever is in charge gets to block whatever websites they like, under whatever flimsy justification they can think of. Anything that can be read as being against the state becomes terrorism, in such schemes. As there are no jail sentences for French officials who abuse the system, and no real way to even define what abuse is, political censorship will happen.

Even child porn is harder to nail down than you would think. One problem is figuring out if the person in the picture is actually a child. For the worst stuff it is of course obvious, but the problems start when e.g. the caption claims the girl is a young looking 18 and the censor decides maybe she's actually 15, but doesn't really know for sure, but hey it's better to be safe than sorry right? And who cares about some guy getting his rocks off to pictures of teenage girls anyway. In the memory hole it goes!

In the UK the age of consent is actually lower than the age at which you are considered to be a child for child porn laws, meaning if a naked teenage couple take a selfie in bed after 100% legal sex, the result can be considered child porn and trigger the full weight of the law. Common sense not applicable!

America has created an even more messed up situation. There they classify cartoons as child porn.

All this of course is based on the assumption that the right approach to dealing with child abuse is to try and block child porn at the ISP level. But paedophilia appears to be some kind of sexual urge or addiction, something fundamentally rooted in brain chemistry or psychology. People who really, really want to look at films of naked children will just use a VPN to America or some other country where there's no censorship in place. It's sort of like trying to ban the sale of cigarettes locally but not ban the import of them. Not gonna work. Medical attention might, though.

If the law worked more like a high quality computer program, with batteries of unit tests and every edge case considered and planned for, AND if politicians and officials were far more disciplined then they actually are, we might be able to say "hmm this sounds OK and isn't going to cause any problems". But France has already proven willing to jail a comedian for making a vague statement that could, theoretically, be read as sympathising with the Charlie Hebdo killers whilst simultaneously telling the world they're gonna defend free speech to the death. So if any country can avoid the slippery slope it's not going to be France.

Re:Its starts with terror and kidding porn

[nbauman]

I heard a Palestinian describing what it's like to negotiate with Israel.

He said, it's like dividing a pizza. First, you divide it in half. Then the other guy says, "I want half of your half too." So he takes that half. Then he says, "I want half of what you've got left...."

Re:Its starts with terror and kidding porn

[nbauman]

You forgot to mention the Palestinians sweetening the pot by blowing up buses (unless that's inconvenient because of walls or border guards), shooting at kids at a 12 year old's party, blowing up a holiday dinner for widowers, shooting rockets or artillery toward towns during morning commute (at a rate of one or two a week during "cease fires").

I could go on for days, actually. People who think the Israelis are ugly should turn their heads and look around 360 degrees and get to know all of Israel's neighbors.

I used to raise money for Israel in the 1980s. I was in the middle of the Jewish establishment. I used to write press releases that ran in the New York Times.

I kept reading stories in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal about Israelis killing Palestinians. The ones that really got to me were the Israelis killing Palestinian children. I remember a story in the NYT about an Israeli chasing a 12-year-old girl named Aasma, who ran away screaming, until he shot her in the head and killed her.

I didn't just believe the NYT. I read the Amnesty International reports. And I didn't just believe the AI reports. I asked Israeli government officials. Their answer? They denied it happened. They said the Palestinians made it all up. The Palestinians lied.

I checked them out. It was the Israelis who were lying.

That was long before any Palestinian suicide bombings or bus bombings. The Palestinians were mostly meek and passive. I kept thinking to myself, "Why don't they get guns and fight back? The Jews would."

There were lots of Palestinians who wanted peace with the Israelis. The Israelis actually made it illegal for the Palestinians to talk about having a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel side-by-side. They arrested Palestinians for talking about peace. I know because I read the AI reports, and called the Israeli government about it.

Finally after the Israelis demonstrated that the peaceful Palestinians would get nowhere, the Palestinians did fight back, though not in the way I expected. They started blowing up buses with suicide bombs. Of course, it's terrible when innocent people get killed, Palestinian or Jew. But the Israelis were provoking, beating, arresting and killing the Palestinians for years before the Palestinians finally decided to fight back.

Of course I could give you facts and supporting evidence, but I've done that many times before and I know what the Israeli-firsters say. They just brush it off and say that it's not true, the Palestinians are lying, Amnesty International is lying, B'Tselem is lying, Haaretz is lying, the UN is lying, the NYT is lying, the BBC is lying, everybody else in the world is lying except Israel and MEMRI, because everybody else in the world is anti-Semitic and hates Israel. And I expect that's what you're going to say.

But maybe I'm wrong. Go read the Goldstone report. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/... If you don't believe that, I won't waste any more time with you.

Blocking is counter productive

[X10]

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.

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.

Block Slashdot

[ThePhilips]

I have just witnessed Slashdot featuring right on the front page and article about *both* terrorism and child pornography!

Burn the witch!

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:Making fun of religion

[davydagger]

to be honest, you have a point. As a free speech activist, you either have sacred cows or you don't. While I certain stand with Charlie Hedbo in their right to ruthlessly attack Islam, and every other religon, idea, country, etc... BUT

I think its outrageous that we honor them by implementing this wonton censorship. This is the sort of thing they litterally died for. That said, its not freedom of speech. Now lets look a the two organizations. One is a government cracking down on dissent, and the other is a filthy magazine known for taking pot shots at everyone. I think the two statements are not incompatible

I am Charlie

I am not the French Government