French President Nicholas Sarkozy means well. In the wake of horrific antisemitic murders reportedly pulled off by a Qaida-trained killer, Sarkozy is proposing to lock up frequent visitors to pro-terrorist websites. However understandable, the move would cripple open source attempts at understanding terrorism trends without stopping terrorists.

"Anyone who regularly consults internet sites which promote terror or hatred or violence will be sentenced to prison," Sarkozy argued to a political rally in France on Thursday. "What is possible for pedophiles should be possible for trainee terrorists and their supporters, too."

But terror porn doesn't work like kiddie porn. For one thing, visitors to jihadist websites like the al-Shmukh forum aren't just terrorist wannabees. They're also lurking terrorism researchers or, um, journalists like us. And there's law enforcement and intelligence officers monitoring them to discern the next moves of potentially dangerous people.

Let's say Sarkozy carves out an exception for security officials. Immediately, the public would lose access to any academic or journalistic descriptions of just what online jihadi life is like. Law enforcement, like the rest of us, uses media reports to supplement their own analysis in order to make sure a big trend isn't going unnoticed. Bye bye, SITE Institute. Nice knowing you, Jihadica. Meanwhile, the jihadis would just route around, probably bouncing to newer forums or adding deeper layers of encryption.

There's no U.S. component to the French bill. Nor is there any complementary U.S. call for locking up terrorism lurkers. That may come as a relief, as a new effort gathering steam in the Justice Department would expand the scope of the U.S.' wide surveillance dragnet.

The Justice Department isn't proposing to spy on more people. It's proposing to keep personal or business information from the millions of Americans and resident aliens the spy services already spy on for a longer period of time. Five years, to be specific.

"On Day 1, you may look at something and think that it has nothing to do with terrorism," an anonymous official explains to the Washington Post. "Then six months later all of a sudden it becomes relevant."

Perhaps. But it's unclear what the government will do with communications, visa records and other harvested personal information during the interim. It's also unclear why the Justice Department would want the National Counterterrorism Center to hold a piece of constitutionally-protected data for five years – a long time in the intelligence world.

The government is already taking an interest in so-called "historic" intelligence data. The giant Utah data center that the National Security Agency is constructing is reportedly devoted to breaking encryption measures, so U.S. surveillance dons could crack a backlog of surveillance on foreign powers.

Imagine if Sarkozy was American. His proposal might go over like a lead balloon in a country more traditionally concerned with civil liberties. But it would just keep reporters like this blog's writers from learning the latest trends in terrorism. And if the Justice Department adopts the new guidelines, the government could keep our names in its files for years, even after it's clear to them that we don't have any connection to terrorism.