Sarkozy
TechDirt writes today: France Continues Its Campaign To Pass The Worst Internet-Related Laws Around
Perhaps it’s a race of some sort to see which country can pass the worst laws related to the internet possible, and France feels that it’s falling behind other countries? After approving a “three strikes” law that will kick those accused (not convicted) of file sharing off the internet, someone in our comments reminded us that France is also looking to implement a file sharing tax on ISPs (Google translation) — even though there’s already such a levy on storage media. So… your connection gets taxed in case you’re sharing music, your storage gets taxed again for that same shared music… and you can get kicked offline for it anyway.
And then a bunch of folks have pointed out that French politicians are looking to implement new laws that give police the ability to use keylogging software, force ISPs to censor certain sites on a “banned” list, and create a massive database of information on citizens. All of these things have appeared in other forms around the globe. All with great controversy. So it’s quite impressive that France is trying to take them on all at once. Who knows if this latest bill will pass, but it really cements the idea that Sarkozy seriously dislikes the internet, and would like to put as many controls on it as possible.
The Sun (where else) picks up on a German company snooping on the sex lives of it’s employees:
A German telecoms giant has been caught secretly snooping into its job applicants’ Sex Lives
Deutsche Telekom authorised Stasi-style spying, according to a 2004 document entitled Company Security Personnel Screening.
It said the company hired private German investigators to spy on a female manager for a Croatian telecoms company who applied for a job at DT?s subsidiary in the country.
The document revealed intimate personal details, including how many lovers she had and her select association with older men”.
Privacy and Civil Liberties being restricted further.
