(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


Those French police are at it again!

2024-08-26 00:00:00

Reading about the arrest of the CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, revived memories of the admirably robust attitudes of les flics nearly thirty years ago.

In early 1996, perhaps sooner than that, the French police had noticed a lot of “child pornography” was becoming available, principally courtesy of Usenet Newsgroups. There had been a case before then in the USA where “child pornography” was being distributed using Bulletin Boards but, strictly-speaking these operated directly through the telephone system rather than over what we now think of as the internet. In 1996 in France it was unquestionably an internet case.

I don’t think the cops in Paris ever thought the respectable entrepreneurs who had established the first French ISPs (Internet Service Providers) did so in order to sell access to cyberspace to businesses and the public knowingly or deliberately intending to facilitate the distribution of anything illegal but that did not rule out the possibility they were being careless or negligent and there was also a French law which appeared to say that didn’t matter anyway. If it was coming via them…..

So what did the French police do? They drove several trucks up to the offices of two ISPs, went in, unplugged every server, carted them off then arrested everyone they could lay their hands on. Eventually the heads of two ISPS were charged with possessing child sex abuse material. The charges were later dropped but a big warning flare had been sent up.

This all happened in May/June 1996. A few months later in August Inspector French of the Clubs and Vice Unit of London’s Metropolitan Police sent his famous letter to the UK’s ISPs and this, with an additional prompt from the Government, led in short order to the formation of the Internet Watch Foundation.

In fact, in December 1995 the Hong Kong police had raided an ISP and arrested several of its employees for apparently helping distribute “obscene material” over the internet so maybe the French had taken their cue from them. But then Paris is a lot closer to London than Hong Kong so the impact on the Brits was proportionately greater. The rest is history, as they say.

One way or another, by arresting Durov, what the French police have done is send up another warning flare. It is impossible to uphold the Rule of Law if large spaces are deliberately created to allow all kinds of criminal acivity to flourish with little or no possibility of holding to account the individuals committing the crimes. Elon Musk disagrees with me. That’s how I know I’m right.

Quite how we will resolve this is not yet clear. But the status quo is not sustainable in the medium to longer run.
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[1] URL: https://johncarr.blog/2024/08/26/those-french-police-are-at-it-again/
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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