Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/23/french-government-proposes-new-ban-on-filming-and-photographing-police.html
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Sounds like its about time for another French Revolution.
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Looking forward to the confusion where one side publishes video of the police beating the shit out of protesters and another outlet publishes the same video of police curing the public with their Wellness Batons.
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If it were up to me, every cop would have an identification number in 150 mm / 6" tall digits on the front and back of their uniform, and would have their policing authority privileges revoked automatically for any period in which any of those identifying digits were deliberately obscured.
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Did they copy and paste this from Belarus? Either way Lukashenko will be happy.
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I remember when Emmanuel Macron was being touted as the new “leader of the free world” in response to Trump’s presidency. It was dumb back then, and it’s especially dumb now.
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Strangely enough, I want to push an entirely opposite law that mandates constant surveillance of police officers, publishes that surveillance for public view, and gives detailed, updated biographies of every police officer. Whether France or the U.S., the public is paying these workers – the public deserves to know exactly how their money is being spent.
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I wish there was an age of digital surveillance being the world topic at hand, I feel like Snowden really ushered in an era that was ignored by enough of the world.
This shit seriously needs to end- it’s only going to continue to get worse unless there is some mass event or revelation on a global scale of how this is evil and why it needs to be stopped.
Then again I think of Xinjang and everything else going on…
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So the Macron government wants to turn France into a literal panopticon then.
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In the USA we still see people photographing buildings from public areas accused of terrorism on the basis that they could be planning harm.
The word harm is so broad as to be meaningless. If a snowflake feels sad because their misbehavior is exposed, snowflakes are going to call that harm.
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Don’t worry, the law is clearly worded and nobody–especially law enforcement–would ever attempt to misinterpret or subvert it to control the populace.
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As usual, discussing this as a real problem is impossible because of the vast number of fellow citizens who either don’t care or are actively in favor of it. When half the population can’t ever be counted on to do the right thing, no matter how blindingly obvious, it becomes very difficult to have a conversation about digital surveillance (or climate change, or human rights, or government corruption, or any other serious problem that needs fixing) with the goal of making real, positive change. It’s never “How can we work together to solve this trend of abusive privacy invasion?”, it’s always “If you have nothing to hide, why do you need privacy?”. It’s like trying to work together with a flat-earther to figure out the best way to save the planet from a potential asteroid impact.
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Meh. His entire election campaign was run on the slogan, “I’m not the Neo-Nazi” and not much else.
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As a French resident, I’ve generally felt that it’s better here than in US, that while there are still racist and otherwise problematic officers and incidents, the police in general are more accountable in France than in the US. But this law signals to me that the French government wants to undo that and hide the actions of the police, which seems totally counter to the values of liberté, égalité, fraternité that the French government wants migrants like me to absorb. The term “global security” clearly applies to the government and not the governed. I’ll bet Alexandre Benalla wishes he had waited for this law before beating protesters while impersonating a police officer (which is a crime in France – impersonating a police officer, I mean – but if police officers can’t be filmed and you’re posing as one…?).
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