Loppsi Offsi

In what may be one of the early skirmishes in the battle by governments to master the internet, the French are currently debating Loppsi II, a draft law to filter Internet traffic (amongst other things).

The bill was approved last week by the National Assembly (where the government has a large majority) and will now go on for a second and final reading in the Senate (where the government also has a majority). If the Senate makes no amendments that will be the final reading, as the government has declared the
bill "urgent," which reduces the usual cycle of four
readings to two.

The bill contains a number of unrelated measures:

• boosting police spending on "security" increasing

• penalties for counterfeiting
  checks or credit cards,

• increasing CCTV

• extending
  access to the police national DNA database

• authorizing the seizure
  of vehicles driven without a license

• criminalising
  online identity theft

• allow police to tap Internet connections as well
  as phone lines

• ordering ISPs to filter Internet connections to target child pornography

Plenty for our freedom-loving French friends to worry about, no? Let's hope les amis don't allow the rugby to distract them from this issue…

Vis a vis filtering, ISPs will be required to block access to any Internet address the
authorities consider "necessary to prevent distribution of child
pornography."

Blocking sites suspected of hosting child pornography is likely to
affect blameless sites at the same IP address. Opposition amendments -
that a judge would review the list of blocked URLs each month to ensure
that sites were not needlessly blocked, and to make the filters a
temporary measure until their effectiveness was proven – were rejected.

Of course, filtering won't stop the spread of child pornography – distributors already use encrypted peer-to-peer
systems. Indeed, the French Federation of Telecommunications has said that filtering would cost up to €140 million but would be largely ineffective against the main child pornography distribution channels.

Once installed, the filter system could be used to censor other materials or limit access to other Internet sites. Which appeals to President Sarkozy – in a speech in January, he said that authorities should experiment with filtering in order to automatically remove all forms of piracy from the Internet.

Zut alors!

By Alex Deane