Critics of government-mandated filtering schemes contend that such programs first focus on "child pornography" because it's such an unobjectionable target for censorship—but once the program is in place, it's much easier to extend it to more controversial areas, such as copyright protection. At least the French have the decency to admit that this is what's happening.

The French lower house, the National Assembly, has just passed a security bill known as LOPPSI2, and it's expected that the Senate will follow suit in the next few weeks. As we've previously reported, LOPPSI2 is a grab bag of security items that includes state-sanctioned computer Trojans, a massive new database of citizen data (dubbed "Pericles"), and a requirement that ISPs start censoring sites on a government blacklist.

The Internet censorship provision has received the most coverage to date, and LOPPI2 has been quite controversial in France; it passed the National Assembly 312-214.

The censorship is ostensibly designed to block child porn sites on the Internet, but French President Nicolas Sarkozy has already made it clear that he would like to see ISPs play a far greater role in clamping down on the Internet. In a January speech (French PDF) in which Sarkozy styled himself a "patron" of the French arts, he praised the new "three strikes" law his administration championed (and passed into law last year).

The HADOPI authority that oversees the system will, he said, need to keep searching for the most "modern" solutions to protecting works. Simply searching out file-swappers and disconnecting or fining them is a reactive approach that doesn't scale; as Sarkozy put it, "The more we automatically 'depollute' networks and servers from all sources of piracy, the less it will be necessary to resort to measures imposed on the 'Internautes' [French Internet users]. We must therefore try, without delay, filtering devices."

Under Sarkozy, France is moving to a more proactive enforcement model that removes or blocks content at the source, rather than being content to go after lawbreakers. As a consequence, however, France will now have one of the toughest censorship regimes of any robust democracy in the Western hemisphere—though Australia is giving France a good run for its money on the worldwide stage.

Journalists in neighboring countries have been quick to pounce. Germany's Der Spiegel wondered if France was becoming the "Big Brother of Europe" and notes that LOPPSI2 will give "the state unprecedented control over the Internet." The paper also suggests that the government is pushing the law because elections are coming up soon, and Sarkozy hopes that "fear of criminals will convince voters to come to the polling booths."

In the UK, feisty tech publication The Register also plays the Orwell card, saying that France "leapfrogs past Australia in Big Brother stakes" and that it's "becoming the first western country to make even Australia look liberal when it comes to state powers of Internet censorship." (The UK has a non-mandatory child porn block list run by the Internet Watch Foundation.)

As for France, plenty of heated opposition can be found there as well. Jérémie Zimmermann of Internet rights group La Quadrature du Net said last week, "Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous drifts. After the HADOPI comes the LOPPSI: the securitarian machinery of the government is being deployed in an attempt to control the Internet at the expense of freedoms."

Censorship... it's not just for authoritarian states anymore. Such issues are increasingly part of the discourse in democracies, including Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority democracy. The government there is working up Internet censorship rules to crack down on sites that offend "public decency," including pornography (child and otherwise).

In a sign that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has rather peculiar views on freedom of speech, he complained at a recent press conference about a protestor who put his picture on a water buffalo and marched it through Jakarta. Yudhoyono didn't like the implication that he was "big, slow and stupid like a buffalo," and he asked reporters, "Do you think this is an expression of freedom?"