French lawmakers voted Tuesday to approve a controversial draft law designed to filter Internet traffic, a step the government alleges is necessary to catch child pornographers. The bill will now proceed to the nation’s senate, where it will be given a second reading.
Known as Loppsi II, the bill was passed by the National Assembly on Tuesday with a vote of 312 to 214. Analogous to the US House of Representatives, the National Assembly is dominated by the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the party of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Controlling 313 of the 577 possible votes in the Assembly, the UMP leveraged their absolute majority with a commanding 311 votes in favor of the bill.
The bill now goes before the Senate, where the UMP once again dominates with 151 of 343 possible representatives. As the bill has been marked “urgent” by the Sarkozy administration, it will bypass additional Parliamentary re-readings and be written into law if the Senate does not amend the text. Any disagreements between the two chambers of Parliament will be reconciled by a commission appointed by, again, the UMP government.
According to reports, the bill is “a mishmash of unrelated measures,” including increased police budgets, heavier fines for counterfeiting checks and credit cards, broadening the use of CCTV, extending access to the police national DNA database and authorizing the seizure of vehicles operated by unlicensed drivers.
Amongst measures concerning the Internet, the bill looks to criminalize online identity theft, empower police with the ability to tap telephone and Internet connections for the purposes of investigation and target the proliferation of child pornography by ordering ISPs to block any address authorities deem necessary.
Critics of the measure noted that the cost of a filtering program could exceed €140 million for unproven efficacy. Critics further noted that the web filter would do nothing to prevent the transmission of child pornography through encrypted P2P channels, its more common avenue of trafficking. Finally, opposition leaders said that filtering by IP address would produce collateral damage that could unintentionally knock innocent sites off the web.
Language requiring content to be blocked by URL, reviewed monthly by magistrates and making the firewall temporary until its effectiveness was proven were all rejected by the Sarkozy government.
As the Sarkozy administration has already expressed the desire (PDF) to experiment with filtering to automatically block pirated content, it is widely believed that the bill will pass the Senate and go on to be abused for alternative purposes not described in the document’s language.
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