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?).
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.
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.
Sarko is a cagey motherfucker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I love the double speak about undermining the public good.
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
It was written in 1996 but feels more relevant as every year goes by.
I can't see how they could possibly achieve this.
