Germany Denies Plans to DoS Neo-Nazis

Over the weekend, we learned that Germany's Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, was thinking about DoS'ing neo-Nazi sites -- not a new form of censorship, but the first time a government has put it on the table. Each country has its own type of content so abhorrent that its censorship must not be questioned. If a Bush cabinet member had mentioned that the U.S. is considering ping-flooding Dutch providers of (what we would call) child pornography (nude 17-year-olds), would anyone protest? Soon China will take Falun Gong off the net with trin00 and Kuwait will SYN-flood rogue sites that show pictures of women voting. But anyway, yesterday, the Ministry denied such plans, so the chaotic Balkanization of the net is postponed for another six months. Yay!

My translation of the slug from the April 5 story would be:

Innenminister Otto Schily is considering paralyzing foreign Nazi websites with hacker attacks. For this, the Ministry wants to use so-called Denial-of-Service attacks. With similar methods, hackers last spring blocked out broad portions of the Internet.

And a friend's translation of the April 8 denial:

Schily denies "hacker methods" against Nazi websites

Minister of the Interior rejects assertion his authority wanted to close down Nazi websites with "hacker methods"

BERLIN. The Ministry of the Interior led by Otto Schily (SPD) denied it wanted to act against Nazi websites using "hacker methods." What will be used in the fight against right wing extremism would only be determined by the law, a spokesman said on the weekend.

The story was updated re Kuwait (not Iran) and women voting.