What is the purpose of this law? Does freedom of speech mean nothing to the French?
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. ~news.yahoo.com
The article explains some of the supposed logic of this but I can’t help but think that this seems a bit broad. But then I am willing to entertain the idea that the article itself is misleading and/or incorrect. I mean how many times does the MSM get anything right? How many articles do not receive some kind of misleading bias?
The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of “happy slapping,†in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker’s friends.  ~news.yahoo.com
Sounds almost reasonable. But why not write the law in order to narrowly target exactly this situation rather than something else entirely? Other information in this article tells us that there is a different agenda involved entirely.
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. ~news.yahoo.com
How long before this makes it into U.S. law as campaign finance reform?