If your laws don't allow you to punish someone, just make new ones

"That Washington would like to take legal action against him and as quickly as possible can hardly be in doubt. But building a case solid enough to allow Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, to seek Assange's extradition from Britain, if that is where he still is at the time, or – possibly more problematically – from Sweden, may not be easy. The most obvious first stop might be the 1917 Espionage Act. But when the US government tried to use it to punish The New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, it failed.

It is for that reason that some US politicians are introducing draft legislation to expand existing US laws to make it easier for Mr Holder to do his job. The so-called Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination (Shield) Bill was thus introduced by Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York who will become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when the new House of Representatives with a Republican majority convenes in January." [The Independent]

PS: Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination? Don't you think that Republicans are really bad for names?

Law against Photoshop

There has been lately a small controversy about french parliament intention of warning whether or not one image has been modified using programs like Photoshop [CNN], which has rapidly received the opposition of the fashion and advertising industry [New York Magazine].

There's no doubt that there have been many abuses (as you can see in the pictures at the end of this post, but, is it necessary to make a law to control it? That is the real point.

My personal opinion? I think it is a good idea to try to put a limit to the use of Photoshop, at least in mass media and advertisement; but at the same time, I am pretty sure it is impossible to survey all the graphic content published (even if it was only in magazines).

And the last point, I would bet that at least 99,9% of images published in magazines are, at least, filtered with Photoshop or similar, so does filtering belong to the category of alteration with Photoshop? Does it deserve the warning? And if not, where is the limit where a real "alteration" begins?