France calls for an "international Internet police force"

09/08/2008

Besides offering up information one might like to see, like the perfect brownie recipe or an answer to a bothersome question, the Internet also contains information that may be considered extremely offensive, harmful, or even illegal. There are many options available to parents of children who frequent the net, but how can all citizens, especially the victims of child pornography, be protected from offensive material? Various countries around the world are fighting back with legislature to combat the proliferation of illicit and harmful material on the Internet, but some may be going too far.

Nadine Morano, Frances Minister for Family Affairs, has ordered the establishment of an international Internet police force, with the aims of protecting children from offensive material such as the millions of files of child pornography that are already being transferred throughout the internet. In addition, France has also decided to employ Internet censorship via Internet service providers in hopes of eventually protecting all citizens from offensive material on EU websites. This includes certain websites relating to terrorism, hate, and pornography. According to the September 2 issue of the French newspaper Le Figaro, Morano is scheduled to meet with officials from other members of the EU on a joint organization for safety on the internet on September 18.

The US and other countries have enacted similar policies and police department programs aimed at catching people who download child pornography from the Internet. Various Internet service providers have already agreed to block child pornography websites. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for a detective to enter a chat room posing as a child, nor is it uncommon for an investigator to enter chat rooms or forums for parents of children who seek sexual encounters with the children of other like-minded parents, and this work has not been in vain.

- Last month 55 men were charged in California for possessing child pornography following an eight-month investigation using the abovementioned tactics.

- Greek police caught 21 people in a May bust of a child pornography ring believed to be part of a European network.

- Just this month police in Switzerland have broken up an Internet child pornography ring involving hundreds of men in Germany, 40 in Austria, 13 in Switzerland, and four in Liechtenstein.

On the other hand, several countries in Asia have had problems with national Internet police. In China, the 2006 Provisions on the Technical Measures for the Protection of the Security of the Internet is in place for the purposes of promoting the sound and orderly development of the Internet and safeguarding the state security social order and public interests. Websites with blocks belong to Western media and human rights organizations, which China has decided are politically and/or socially harmful. Other blocked sites pertain to Taiwanese and Tibetan independence, SARS, opposition political parties, anti-Communist movements, and any group that can organize large numbers of people, like the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Police in South Korea have also been policing the Internet, to the consternation of its citizens. A recent blog posting states, Having arrested the civic activists who were part of the Peoples Countermeasure Council against Mad Cow Disease and, as such, led the protests in Seoul City Hall plaza, they [the police] are now moving to arrest people who used the Internet to protest against the same things, and, &the police have given up on trying to maintain legal procedures and their own honor.

The Malaysian government has blocked access to the popular and controversial Malaysia Today, which has been known for, in the opinion of Malays, exposing the misdeeds of officialdom and the failings of individual leaders  what the government calls lies and defamatory articles. The proliferation of false information is unfortunately uncommon, and it is equally unfortunate that a government would do its best to quash anything that would cause the government to lose face.

It is often difficult to cleanly classify what constitutes contumacious material, and what constitutes inoffensive media. Betsy Schneider, a photographer professor at Arizona State University, has recently come under fire for photos of her own children that many people label as child pornography. Schneider had taken a nude photograph of her children each day of their lives, and stated that it was to mark the passage of time. She said, I want to make art about whats the most important thing in my life and its my children. However, when she put some of the photos on exhibit in a Phoenix gallery, many people came not to admire art, but to protest pediatric smut. They claimed the photographs were simply naked pictures, and put Schneiders children in danger of coming into contact with pedophiles.

Frances Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie realizes that there is a thin line between censoring blatantly inappropriate material and stifling its citizens rights to free speech granted by the Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen*. He maintains that despite recent calls for censorship, France supports the fundamental liberty that is Internet access.

*The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely&

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