Jackie Danicki

You know, I absolutely love France. Its perpetually assholish governments…not so much. Here’s the latest dangerous, stupid thing they’ve come up with: Making it against the law for anyone but ‘professional journalists’ to report on acts of violence.

The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday.

This law was proposed by Nicolas Sarkozy, who is - unbelievably and unfortunately - the best of a very dreadful crowd of French presidential candidates. (See what I mean about France? Ugh.) Sarkozy is being advised by Six Apart’s European VP, Loic LeMeur. I can’t imagine that Loic had anything to do with this piece of evil garbage being tabled, and I wonder if he’ll have anything to say about it. Because it gets worse.

The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet.

The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists’ organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.

Go ahead, create “government-approved sources of information” - it’ll just make it that much easier to identify those sources which are not to be trusted.

Filed under: Blogging, Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend