Internet Censorship in France

During the debate over the French security bill (LOPPSI), the government opposed all the amendments seeking to minimize the risks attached to filtering Internet sites.

The refusal to make this measure experimental and temporary shows that the executive could not care less about its effectiveness to tackle online child pornography or about its disastrous consequences.

This measure will allow the French government to take control of the Internet, as the door is now open to the extension of Net filtering.

Moreover, whereas the effectiveness of the Net filtering provision cannot be proven, the French government refuses to take into account the fact that over-blocking - i.e the collateral censorship of perfectly lawful websites - is inevitable2.

Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous drifts. After the HADOPI comes the LOPPSI: the securitarian machinery of the government is being deployed in an attempt to control the Internet at the expense of freedoms , concludes Jérémie Zimmermann, spokesperson for La Quadrature du Net.

French lawmakers will vote today on a proposal to filter Internet traffic. Part of a new security bill, the measure is supposedly to catch child pornographers. Once the filtering system is in place, though, it will allow the government to censor other material too.

The National Assembly has already spent two days debating the grandly titled Bill on direction and planning for the performance of domestic security, known as Loppsi II in French, with deputies voting to reject all the amendments that sought to limit the Internet filtration provisions.

If adopted as such, the law will oblige ISPs to block the access to the sites included on a list established by the French administration without any judicial control, under the pretext of the protection of children. When the need to fight against the dissemination of images and representations of minors according to the provisions of article 227-23 of the criminal code justifies it, the administrative authority notifies the persons mentioned at item 1 (i.e.ISPs) the Internet addresses of online public communication services that are subject to the provisions of this article for which these persons must prevent the access without delay says article 4 of the law.

Lionel Tardy also proposes to force the administrative authority to specify to the ISPs which are the filtering techniques they can use to block paedophilic sites. The law must not resume to ordering the blocking of the access to certain Internet sites, but indicate to ISPs what techniques they may use. The obligation they bear should be an obligation of means and for that, the means that can be put in force must be listed said the deputy.

Deputies had sought to amend the text to require blocking only of specific URLs or documents, not of entire sites, so as to reduce collateral damage, and to require that a judge review the list of blocked URLs each month to ensure that sites were not needlessly blocked. Those amendments were, however, rejected, as was one making the filters a temporary, experimental measure until their effectiveness was proven.

Similar arguments on over-blocking were raised by Aurélien Boch from Internet users association OBEDI who explained: when an address is filtered, all the sites hosted by the same server will be filtered whether it is the site of Nouvel Observateur or a pornographic site. He also pointed out that as the list will be secret, it will be impossible to verify which sites are filtered .

The French General Assembly has adopted a bill on December 15 to allow the Government to filter the internet without court intervention.

Article 4 of the so-called LOPPSI 2 law on guidelines and programming for the performance of internal security), referred to the blocking of child pornography sites.

But some MPs among the assembly attacked Article 4, which in effect allowed the government to filter the Internet using a blacklist issued by the Ministry of Interior, without the intervention of the judiciary. Critics of the measure argued it might also allow the ISP-level blocking of websites considered by the authorities as undesirable, without judiciary control.

After passing through the French National Assembly, the text will go back to the Senate at the beginning of 2011.

Update: Passed

29th March 2011. Based on article from laquadrature.net

The French Constitutional Council has released its decision1 regarding the LOPPSI bill. Judges held that article 4 of the bill, which allows the executive branch to censor the Net under the pretext of fighting child pornography, is not contrary to the Constitution. In doing so, the constitutional court has failed to protect fundamental freedoms on the Internet, and in particular freedom of expression. Hopes lie now in European institutions, which are the only ones with the power to prohibit or at least supervise administrative website blocking and its inherent risks of abuse.

The LOPSSI law compiled many repressive measures on vastly unrelated subjects. The Constitutional Council found itself caught by this strategy. While it did strike down some of the most shocking provisions, it left untouched those that seemed less harmful or were proposed in the name of noble goals, in spite of having a highly detrimental impact on civil liberties, such as the ones related to the Internet.

The French citizen rights group La Quadrature reported this week that its government is entertaining an executive draft that would give the French government the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the Net. According to the site, the law would grant government officials the power to cut off access to websites which harms or otherwise puts at risk public order and security, the protection of minors, of public health, national defence, or physical persons.

News site Tech Dirt compared the order to China's infamous internet censorship, the cleverly-titled Great Firewall. We'll leave it to our readers to come up with a funny French pun for the country's own efforts.

Jeremie Zimmermann, a spokesperson for La Quadrature, criticized the proposal.

This draft executive order aims to give the government a vastly disproportionate power to censor any website or content on the Internet, said Zimmermann. It is an obvious violation of the principle of separation of powers, and strongly harms freedom of communication online. This is an extremely disturbing drift, in direct continuity with the French government's repressive

He concluded that the order must absolutely be rejected.

Offsite Comment: France on its way to total Internet censorship?

28th June 2011. See article from indexoncensorship.org by Félix Tréguer

On 15 June, 2011, website PC INpact revealed the existence of a draft executive order which would give the French government the power to arbitrarily censor any content or service on the Net.

To implement article 18 of the law for the Digital Economy of June 21st, 2004, the French government is proposing to give to several of its ministries the power to order the censorship of online content that harms or otherwise puts at risk public order and security, the protection of minors, of public health, national defence, or physical persons*. Websites ranging from WikiLeaks to The Pirate Bay could fall under the broad scope of the decree.

...Read the full article

A French court has ruled that local ISPs must block access to the website, Copwatch Nord Paris I-D-F , that shows pictures and videos of police officers arresting suspects, taunting protesters and allegedly committing acts of violence against members of ethnic minorities.

Law enforcement officials, who had denounced the site as an incitement to violence against the police, welcomed the decision.

But free speech advocates reacted with alarm, saying the ruling reflected a French tendency to restrict Internet freedoms.

This court order illustrates an obvious will by the French government to control and censor citizens' new online public sphere, said Je're'mie Zimmermann, spokesman for La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based organization that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet.

The police had said they were particularly concerned about portions of the site showing identifiable photos of police officers, along with personal data, including some cases in which officers are said to express far-right sympathies on social networks.

The case was then taken up by Claude Gue'ant, the French interior minister. He had asked the court to issue an order blocking only certain pages of the site, those showing the most sensitive personal information. But ISps argued that this would be impossible,.

The court ordered that the site be blocked immediately.

The terrorist attacks by an Al Qaeda-influenced gunman may signal a new wave of Internet surveillance in France.

President Nicolas Sarkozy used a televised address to propose a new set of laws that criminalize accessing websites affiliated with terrorist sympathizers and hate groups. He said:

From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished,

Don't tell me it's not possible. What is possible for pedophiles should be possible for trainee terrorists and their supporters, too.

Sarkozy was referencing French laws that criminalize access to Internet sites with child pornography.

Comment: Not everyone who accesses such sites supports terrorism or hate

1st April 2012. See article from en.rsf.org

France's National Digital Council requested in a letter to the president on 23 March voicing concern about the proposal and stressing that fundamental freedoms should not be sacrificed in order to combat cyber-crime and defend national security.

Your proposal raises several questions as regards, for example, the method of identifying the person who commits this offence, existing legislation (such as the eCommerce directive) and the fact that Internet service providers are not obliged to keep a user's browsing history, the council's letter said. Furthermore, use of these sites by certain professions (such as journalists and university academics) and their ability to look at them regularly could raise legitimate difficulties when it comes to enforcing this offence.

France's conservative government has unveiled new counterterrorism measures to punish those who visit extremist websites or travel to weapons-training camps abroad, in the wake of killings by an suspected Islamic extremist in southern France last month.

The measures now go to Parliament, where they may face resistance from the Socialists, who say France's legal arsenal against terrorism is already strong enough and that the proposal is a campaign ploy to boost President Nicolas Sarkozy's chances at a second term.

Sarkozy's Cabinet gave its go-ahead to measures that would make it illegal to travel abroad to indoctrination and weapons-training camps for terrorist ends or to regularly visit websites that incite or praise deadly terrorism.

Sarkozy's government insists the measures are needed to fight the relatively new phenomenon of lone wolf terrorism by extremists who self-radicalize online via jihadist Web sites, and are hard for authorities to track.

The Cour de cassation, France's highest court of appeal, has overturned two court orders which required Google to remove copyright infringing items and to block users from uploading these items again in future.

The court ruled that such take-down, stay-down orders contravene the e-Commerce Directive, which forbids EU Member States from imposing a general obligation on ISPs to monitor the content stored on or passing through their networks. The orders were also found to conflict with the French Law for Trust in the Digital Economy (2004).

The French Supreme Court has ruled that Google should censor the words torrent , rapidshare and megaupload from its Instant and Autocomplete search services.

Music industry group SNEP asked the court to stop the terms from being suggested in Google's searches because, it claimed, Google was thereby facilitating piracy.

A lower court rejected the request from SNEP because it said that these links did not constitute infringement of copyright in and of themselves. However, the Supreme Court has reversed the decision, saying that the relief sought by the group was likely to prevent or partially stop infringements.

The search firm actually already blocks piracy-related terms from Autocomplete, but on its own terms. The web giant announced back in December 2010 on one of its blogs that it was taking steps to stop copyright infringement, including blocking search terms closely associated with piracy.

After the anti-Semitic hashtag UnBonJuif (a good Jew) made its way into the trending topics of Twitter in France last October, the Association of Jewish Students in France (UEJF) began legal action against the site.

The UEJF also called for Twitter to implement a censorship system for users to report illegal content or hate speech. So far, this has been to no avail, as the US-headquartered Twitter is claiming to be bound only by US rather than local laws, which would permit such hashtags under the First Amendment.

Speaking on French TV show Medias, le magazine last week, France's minister for the digital economy Fleur Pellerin acknowledged that multinational companies like Twitter, being somehow deterritorialised , raise new challenges . Pellerin added she would like to talk directly with Twitter in order to work out a more co-operative approach to censorship. She said she would in particular like to see Twitter filtering its trending topics list.

In the meantime, the case is still with the Paris courts and the next court date will be 24 January, when a judge will rule on the case.

A French court has ordered Twitter to hand over the identities of users posting to allegedly anti-semetic Twitter hashtags or threads.

In a test case which will have widespread implications for the millions who tweet every day, the Tribunal de Grande Instance ruled it unacceptable for people to post hateful material anonymously.

This was despite lawyers for the hugely popular micro-blogging site refusing to assist detectives.

Jewish students brought the case, claiming Twitter had a moral duty to name and shame hateful posters. In October, the student bodies asked Twitter to remove a number of messages which appeared under the hashtag #unbonjuif (#agoodjew), with examples including: #agoodjew is a dead Jew. The hashtag became the third most popular in France, with thousands attacking the religion.

Alexandre Neri, Twitter's French barrister, had told the court that Twitter data is collected and stored in the United States , namely in San Francisco, where the site is based. Ms Neri said that Twitter was accordingly subject to US law , adding: Should I submit myself to the law of a different country to where I work? I don't know. Ms Neri suggested that only an American judge could decide whether a US company should hand over data to the French authorities.

A Jewish student group has announced it was taking further legal action against Twitter over the supposed lack of response to a French court order to hand over data to help identify the authors of insulting tweets.

The association is claiming the extortionate sum of 38.5 million euros ($50 million) in damages, according to the text of the summons for Twitter to appear before the civil court's criminal division.

Twitter said it was in discussions with the Jewish student group but that unfortunately they are more interested in these grand gestures than in finding an adequate international procedure to obtain the requested information. It added that the French court had only notified it of the earlier ruling a few days ago and that they would appeal the January 24th decision.

Update: Handed Over

13th July 2013. See article from guardian.co.uk

Twitter has handed French authorities data which could identify the users behind a spate of tweets accused of being antisemitic after a long court battle begun by anti-racism campaigners.

In a rare move, Twitter announced that in response to a valid legal request it had provided the Paris prosecutor with data that may enable the identification of certain users that the vice-prosecutor believes have violated French law . Twitter said this gesture put an end to the long legal dispute.