- Saturday, 7 November 2009
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I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand - Tom Stoppard
German parliament passes Internet censorship bill
THE GERMAN parliament passed a bill Thursday imposing censorship of pornographic websites justified by the need to protect children.
The legislation was proposed by a coalition of German social democratic and conservative parties. It requires the country's federal criminal investigators to maintain a list of websites accused of containing child pornography and to distribute it to German ISPs, which will then be required to block queries to those websites with a stop sign.
In its present form, the bill requires only that ISPs display the warning sign. Users will still be able to access the flagged websites, but they will be advised that viewing child pornography is illegal. German legislators also bowed to criticism by adding a sunset clause that will see the law expire in three years.
The bill drew strong protests from German Internet users including hackers, digital freedom activists, bloggers and social notworkers. It triggered an online petition signed by more than 130,000 individuals, 80,000 more than the number required for the petition to be heard on the floor of the German parliament.
The bill also requires the German chief privacy commissioner to periodically review the website block list, but the incumbent official has already balked at that.
Critics have proven that there are more effective, less instrusive ways of suppressing child pornography, such as emailing the web hosting companies involved to get the objectionable content removed from the interwibble almost immediately.
Furthermore, small ISPs might not have sufficient resources to comply with the infrastructure demands of the plan.
The worst fear, of course, is that once the German government has an Internet censorship apparatus in place, it will be deployed by authoritarian elements of the government, political parties or security agencies to repress freedom of political expression, dissent and free access to information. µ
L'Inq
Deutsche Welle
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Here we go again, do we really think of the children :grin:
if you can still access the site after the warning then it's not really censorship, is it?
And showing any type of message means that people at least quickly notice that a site is censored instead of just thinking that it might have gone down. All in all it is a lot fairer then the counterpart systems suggested in many other countries.
But i also think that time and effort would be better spend to get the content taken down instead of displaying warnings or preventing access.
Any form of Censorship will always be abused by some and the damage it does because of that is almost always far greater then any supposed benefit.
But of course the people supporting censorship are usually only interested in the possible abuses of such a system.
The current plan is to deploy DNS based site blocking. This means, by replying FALSE DNS results to specific domain requests, all those accesses are to be redirected unconditionally to the stop sign page.
Now, somebody might choose to surf the interwibble via TOR or the use a non german DNS server. (This is easy, right)
Hence, the main point of such blockades cannot be the prevention of child porn consumption by individuals being aware of their criminal activity.
Censorship is way more effective against the general population when extended to unwelcome political topics. And here the real deal starts.
That's why such an outcry (unheard by the politicians of course) started in germany.
Politicians just got a new name "Internetausdrucker" (rough trans: those who print the internet) in that process.
I don't know where you (or your source L'Inq) got the idea that the "stop sign" is just a warning page that can be clicked away; anyway, you've got that wrong. The intent of the law is to completely block access to the sites in question; this blockade will probably be implemented by changing DNS entries accordingly, i.e. resolving the URL of a website on the blocking list through the DNS server of a German ISP will return the IP address of the server hosting the "stop sign".
Problem No. 1: DNS-based website blocking can be circumvented quite easily. (But try explaining that to a member of a parliament.)
Problem No. 2: Blocking websites does not help abused children. The whole motivation for passing the law is a lie.
Problem No. 3: What's really being done is that a censorship infrastructure is put into place. It's just a matter of time until it's used for other stuff as well.
Problem No. 4: What do you do when those federal cops - with or without a reason - include your own website on The List? As of now, you won't be informed in advance, nor will you have the official possibility to challenge the decision.
Yesterday really was a very black day for democracy, freedom and uncensored information in Germany :-(
Strangely, similar internet censorship laws are voted or discussed in a lot of countries around the globe.
Could they result of some international treaty, like the Anti-Counterfeiting Copyright Agreement which resulted in the three-strikes laws that emerge everywhere ?
I'm not very comfortable with the blacklists being secret.
Anyway this is not what you should be doing if you want to fight fight child porn, like said above just target the content providers. The purpose seems to differ somewhat with the announced one.
Wikileaks has already published some leaked blacklists which include sites not related to child porn.
Starts humming "Horst Wessel"...
What's that? It's not the same? They're doing it for the children?
I remember a speech by some funny looking man with a strange mustache who said the same.
Remember, he was elected. I guess it's inbred in Germans to lust for this kind of behavior.
The German politicians want to convert the World Wide Web into something that looks and feels like the public TV and radio (öffentlich-rechtlicher Rundfunk), formely known as Volksfunk. People are forced to pay for the propaganda, and that's it. Oh, and for owning a computer with Internet access, you are forced to pay for a public radio license. This license was introduced by the Nazis.
Today, a third (!) of the children in German towns like Essen (a bit ironic the name here) live from welfare, that is about 200 Euros per month. Think about it whenever you hear German politicians talk about protecting the children.
not sure why anyone would complain about this law. In it's current form, it only restricts abusive behaviour. Save your complaints for when they change the law to include legitimate topics.
And this law will prevent some abuse. Some abusers do so for money. Cutting off some of the customers cuts off some of the subscription fees. Not everyone has the tech savvy to continue breaking the law if the ISPs start to block illegal websites.
Censorship has a function to separate the truly bad from the truly good, the problem with this, strong values are attached to pornography and many, be say it the majority stamp "good and approved" on it, the march of perversion continues.
I guess these would not mind instead of a fancy set table at a restaurant would settle for the back ally garbage can! Hey guess what, no need to wash hands.
Hardly bonappeti! I bid you Yuck!
Censorship has a function to separate the truly bad from the truly good, the problem with this, strong values are attached to pornography and many, be say it the majority stamp "good and approved" on it, the march of perversion continues.
I guess these would not mind instead of a fancy set table at a restaurant would settle for the back ally garbage can! Hey guess what, no need to wash hands.
Hardly bonappeti! I bid you Yuck!
Well, if they are looking at CP, then I would say they probably are thinking about the children, literally. LOL
RT
www.anonymize.tk