The terrorist attacks by an Al Qaeda-influenced gunman may signal a new wave of Internet surveillance in France. New laws have been proposed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy in his effort to create a "civilized Internet."

On Thursday, Sarkozy used a televised address to propose a new set of laws that criminalize the use of websites affiliated with terrorist sympathizers and hate groups. "From now on, any person who habitually consults Web sites that advocate terrorism or that call for hatred and violence will be criminally punished," he said.

The pronouncement came on the heels of the police manhunt for and 32-hour standoff with Mohamed Merah, a 23-year old French citizen accused of murdering three French paratroopers, a rabbi, and three Jewish schoolchildren. "Don’t tell me it’s not possible," Sarkozy said. "What is possible for pedophiles should be possible for trainee terrorists and their supporters, too.”

Sarkozy was referencing French laws that criminalize access to Internet sites with child pornography, which carry penalties of up to two years imprisonment and €30.000 in fines for "habitual" visitors. Associated Press' Raphael Satter reports that the French Ministry of Justice would not offer additional clarification of Sarkozy's proposal, or indicate whether the same sorts of penalties were being considered for visitors to sites covered by the proposed measure.

Sarkozy's proposal is just the latest step in France's efforts to criminalize the publication and consumption of offensive speech on the Internet. France already has a long history of pressing Internet censorship—in 2000, French laws against anti-Semitic speech were used to force Yahoo to stop Web auctions of Nazi memorabilia.

But the Sarkozy government has added regulations over the past year that could be used to turn Internet providers into police informants, tracking their users' online activities and blocking access to banned sites by French citizens. In 2008, France began a program to build a list of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, flagging sites that contained child pornography and hate speech. France's Constitutional Council ruled last March that "administrative filtering" of the Internet for the purposes of blocking child pornography was constitutional, clearing the way for enforcement of blocking provisions in the LOPPSI 2 law ("Guidance and planning for the performance of homeland security").

In the same month, the French government passed its implementation of European Union e-commerce directives, which placed new data retention requirements on ISPs and website operators—requiring them to retain detailed personal information about all customers' transactions and posting of content, and mandating that they provide law enforcement and other officials access to that data.

The newly proposed law would go even further into both surveillance and censorship, however, because it would treat those viewing the contents of sites designated by the government as terrorist or hate speech as criminals—not just those posting the content.

It's not clear how the French government would enforce the law Sarkozy proposed, or even if the bill would pass constitutional muster if it was approved. Lucie Morillon of the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders told AP's Satter that what particularly is worrying about the proposed law is that the French government would not be able to tell precisely who is looking at a site unless total surveillance of Internet traffic was adopted by France.

And that could well be the case, if Sarkozy gets his way. But there are obvious workarounds. Just as French law hasn't stopped child pornography from getting viewed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jillian York pointed out in a statement that those want to get to material deemed "terrorist" can use anonymizing tools such as the Tor Network or VPNs to get to it, "or simply access it from a variety of locations to avoid appearing as 'habitual' viewers."

That doesn't mean that an actual universal surveillance system in France couldn't detect such evasion. There have already been demonstrations of the use of Tor "fingerprinting" to reduce that network's anonymity, and systems like those from Bivio Networks, Blue Coat, and others can be used to identify patterns in traffic that would point to use of anonymizing software. The real question is whether France has the political will to allow its government to essentially end anonymity online in the interest of preventing would-be jihadis from visiting a discussion site. And much of that may depend on whether Sarkozy wins re-election.

Listing image by Photograph by Nicolas Nova