Germany Institutes Censorship Infrastructure 235
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography. A secret list of IPs will be created by the BKA, Germany's federal police; any attempted access to addresses on this list is blocked, logged (the draft seems to contradict press reports on this point) and redirected to a government page featuring a large stop sign. The law has not yet passed the assembly, however five of the largest ISPs have already agreed to voluntarily submit to the process even without a law in place. Critics argue that with the censorship infrastructure in place, the barrier for blocking access for various other reasons is very low. The fact that the current block can easily be circumvented may lead to more effective technologies to be used in the future. There are general elections as well as elections in several of the states later this year."
Re:/facepalm (Score:1, Informative)
Believe it or not the human race is a bunch of fucking morons.
Re:A good thing (Score:2, Informative)
the thing is, that the average german person things, these laws help preventing childrin from being raped...
its just to rediculus, but the people wont notice anything until it has to do with gasprices beeing increased or cars getting more expensive -_-
Re:STOP (Your IP has just been logged) (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Don't worry (Score:3, Informative)
Miserable failure in Finland (Score:5, Informative)
Short list of problems:
- 98+% false positives, including the top 7 or 8 google hits for "gay porn"
- Majority of sites are in the EU or US, yet the sites are still up
- The law only allows non-finnish sites to be on that list, yet a finnish site critical of the list is blocked.
Re:Miserable failure in Finland (Score:4, Informative)
massive criticism (Score:5, Informative)
There is massive criticism against this within Germany.
Pretty much everyone who knows anything is against it, this includes both the people who know something about the technical details (i.e. IT people) as well as those who know something about child pornography, and even people who were abused as kids.
The summary of the criticism is:
The same in Denmark (Score:2, Informative)
We have the same in Denmark, except here it is the police and "Red Barnet" (child protection NGO) that maintains the DNS blocklist. I think all ISPs uses it.
We have had one case where a legal local site had porn banners, and was blocked due to having banners for a perfectly legal "lolita porn" site. He was delisted again after a day or 2.
The big problem with this list here in Denmark, is that there is no court involved in determining if the content is legal or not. It is Red Barnet and the police that acts as court.
Since IFPI, the danish equivalnet of RIAA got a court order for ISPs to DNS blacklist thepiratebay.org, many danish users has switched nameservers to use opendns and others, so they are no longer protected or blocked from visiting the child porn sites.
This is the fallout of the music industry crusade. More people watching child porn.
Sweden has it (Score:4, Informative)
Sweden already has this policy. It's a blocklist implemented in the DNS structure of Swedish ISP's. Thus it's easily avoided by anyone with even basic computer skills.
Officially it's to block kiddie porn, but there's no public examination of what sites are on the list. Also, it's been demonstrated several times that there's a lot of rather odd choices when it comes to blocking - i.e. a korean site about Bonsai trees is on the list.
There's been quite a lot of controversy surrounding this list, and it's been accused of being the start of a slippery slide towards censorship.
Also, it's essentially useless since it's easily avoided.
"Related" to child pornography? (Score:3, Informative)
"Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography."
I don't know whether the summary was inaccurate, but the phrase "related to child pornography" is extremely disturbing. I run a website which frequently criticises child pornography laws, but doesn't contain child pornography. Will that be censored too?
Even if child pornography is the only material which is blocked, I still don't agree with the filter. Studies [newgon.com] have shown that the majority of prohibited material involving children does not depict sexual abuse. It is also ridiculous to claim that simply accessing freely available child pornography encourages the sexual abuse of children (the music industry certainly doesn't take kindly to people downloading their content without paying, so why should child pornographers?). In Germany, possessing a non-photographic "pornographic" depiction of a character who appears to a virtual child can result in a lengthy prison sentence. Will the filter "protect" cartoon children too?
The methods which the authorities used to push this filter are somehwhat suspect. Germany has, for some time, battled to persuade its citizens to accept internet filtering, however there is a fairly large civil rights community and a strong belief in the freedom of the internet, resulting in much opposition to such censorship. Just a week before the vote on the draft legislation to implement filters, German police coincidentally "broke up [bbc.co.uk]" a huge "child pornography ring", allegedly involving 9000 people. This was presumably a sting operation which involved the logging of the IP addresses of every visitor to a police-operated website, followed by raids on the properties linked to every IP address which had been logged. It doesn't matter that only 50 or so people will be convicted, because the authorities have already won....
Anyone who now opposes internet filtering will be reminded of the huge "child pornography ring" and accused of supporting the horrific sexual abuse of children for huge child pornography networks. Nobody can check the police's evidence because that would be illegal and a child would be "revictimised", while anyone who wanted to check would obviously be a paedophile. And so the draft legislation passed.
and the Kitlers site . . . (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/cgi-bin/seigbest.pl
That will be the first one on the list. Because it reveals that evil Nazi scientists escaped to South America after WWII, and obtained Hitler's DNA from the Russians, and have been mixing it with cat DNA to create Kitlers, which have been shipped around the world, to lead the "The Litter Box Putsch" in your area.
When your cat goosesteps into your living room in jackboots, you'll know the day has arrived.