This story’s been kicking around for a few days, but it’s worth posting. A new law’s been approved in France that’s aimed at criminalizing happy slapping — the disgusting practice of filming assaults (generally with a mobile phone) on innocent, unsuspecting people — by making it illegal to film or broadcast acts of violence unless you’re a professional journalist.
Beefing up laws against happy slapping sounds great, but there’s a huge problem here. Happy slapping isn’t the only thing that people film on their mobile phones. What happens if somebody films some other act of violence not as a participant, but as an eyewitness? This could be a member of the public filming something with the intention of sending it to the news, or perhaps to document police brutality or government violence, which gets right to the heart of the idea of sousveillance.
The intent of the lawmakers isn’t clear. Was the law simply made so broad without thinking, or, as a French civil liberties group alleges, was it a deliberate decision to give the authorities control over the dissemination of information? After all, even if they couldn’t pinpoint a photographer or videographer of a piece of material, they could conceivably go after broadcasters or publishers who show it — which could create an environment of self-censorship.
The government has apparently proposed a system to certify web sites, hosting companies, mobile operators and the like, in which it will dub them government-approved sources of information if they follow certain rules. That gives the impression that they will use the law to go after other sites that don’t get approved, and the whole certification process sounds like little more than an agreement to censorship.
There’s little doubt that happy slapping is something we’d all be better off without, but not at the expense of free speech and a free press for everybody, not just professionals.
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