France Makes Effort to Criminalize Bloggers, Internet News Sites

In a warning to the sanctity of free speech in a democratic nation, France is about to show us what happens when the state is allowed to legally determine who is allowed to be a “journalist”, or who is a “legitimate” source of news: You get the criminalization of speech.

France bans citizen journalists from reporting 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 would, in fact, place the power to silence whistleblowers from being able to expose abuse by government officials into the hands of those very officials in the case of police abuse, for instance.

But, the French government isn’t only trying to stop the internet broadcasting of violence – a goal that almost sounds reasonable if not thought out too thoroughly.

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.

Ah, here we go. A “certification system” is merely another word for government censorship and total control of the media.

We in the USA better watch this kind of dangerous curb to free speech. If this approach becomes popular in Europe, this kind of oppression will surely knock on the doors of the U.S. Congress in short order.

Call this an early warning.