France

The government's anti-terrorism measure, the Law on Everyday Security (LSQ), urgently approved almost unanimously by parliament without discussion on 15 November 2001, extended to a year the minimum period ISPs must keep a record of their customers' Internet activity and e-mail traffic. The law allows judges to use "secret methods that cannot be revealed for reasons of national defence" to decode e-mail messages and requires encryption firms to hand over their codes so the authorities can read the messages. Campaigners for freedom of expression protested against such hasty passage of a measure that had not been discussed or negotiated and which threatened the principle of confidentiality of professional and private communications. Another measure, the Internal Security Policy and Planning Law (LOPSI), passed on 31 July 2002, allows police detectives to make remote online searches of ISPs with prior court permission and have "direct access to data considered necessary to establish the truth." A bill on the digital economy (LEN), presented on 15 January 2003 to incorporate into French law the 2000 European directive on e-commerce, contains a clause about the civil and criminal responsibility of ISPs that France's Constitutional Court had struck out of a bill on the information society drafted by the previous government in 2001. The clause (article 2) relieves ISPs of civil and criminal responsibility if they had "no knowledge of illegal activity or material" or if they "acted promptly to remove or block access to it as soon as they discovered it." ISPs are also exempted from civil responsibility if they "have no knowledge of how the illegal activity or material arose." These conditions encourage harassment by pressure groups and open the way to private censorship and self-censorship by ISPs. The bill was passed on a first reading by parliament on 25 February. LINKS: - The organisation Iris ("Let's Imagine an Internet of Solidarity) - National Commission on Cyber-freedoms - Key official documents