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."
Inc. China (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 1) Child Porn
2) Other "Offensive" Material (e.g. Nazi Material)
3) ???
4) Welcome to the great firewall
Re:/facepalm (Score:4, Insightful)
Governments always want to subdue and control. They see lack of control as the problem. Citing childporn/hatespeech/_______ is but a means to an end.
Don't worry (Score:5, Insightful)
It will only be used to block sites with child porn
and terrorism sites
and sites with info on building bombs
and "pro-ana" sites
and bestiality sites
and sites critical of the government
and copyright violating sites
and sites with violent images
and sites with malware
and porn sites
and sites with content that is considered to be offensive by some
and ...
ok, maybe you should worry
Re:Inc. China (Score:5, Insightful)
In other countries it has led to exactly that.
Re:Inc. China (Score:5, Insightful)
But look at what ended up on our blacklist here in Australia (it's also on wikileaks). It too was set up to counter the scourge of child porn.
But we ended up with blocked sites containing
euthanasia
abortion
malware
online gambling
It's not much of a stretch to see other politically sensitive topics being blocked.
Idea (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Inc. China (Score:5, Insightful)
It's impossible to know that.
Hiccup in logic. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hiccup in logic. (Score:3, Insightful)
Some are.
Most people are. If you take a subset of the general population that doesn't have a criterium which excludes idiots, you'll end up with lots of idiots in the subset, too.
Re:Inc. China (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem is that the list is SECRET, and the selecting of offensive sites isn't up for discussion. You have no way of controlling the censorship.
What is it they say about systems and entropy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hiccup in logic. (Score:5, Insightful)
This has as much to do with child porn as WMD's had to do with the American invasion of Iraq.
I'd say that's a pretty damn accurate way to put it.
Re:Inc. China (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe that this necessary will lead to censorship of other "offensive" or politically incorrect material. Here in Norway, we've had a similar filter[1] in place for a few years now, and it hasn't been extended in any degree to include anything other than what has been deemed as child porn.
How do you know? You can't get to it, so how could you possibly know if it's child porn or if anything that isn't child porn has been censored??? How hard would it be to twist that rule without your knowledge that it's been twisted?
Re:Inc. China (Score:2, Insightful)
Even worse [heise.de] [link target in German]: According to the linked page,
Translation (emphasis by me):
That is, if you happen to access a blocked page (for whatever reason) you have to prove that you were in error. This may be quite hard.
As a concrete example how you might get problems: There was once an Open Source project to implement a free OS (AllianceOS). At one time I decided to check what happened with that project, and therefore typed the URL of their home page (which I remembered). To my great surprise what opened was not the home page of the project, but a porn site. Googling around taught me that the domain had expired and then taken by some porn provider. Now imagine it had been a blocked child porn site: I would have had a very hard time to prove that I reached the site in error. After all I explicitly typed in the URL!
Why not get those sites on the list closed? (Score:2, Insightful)
So my question is: Why don't they get those sites closed?
There was an article in c't, the German IT magazine. I'm citing from the online version [heise.de]
Short sumary: The child proteciton organization Carechild did an interesting experiment: They used 20 of the entries from the Danish blocklist. 17 of those URLs were in the US, one each in Netherlands, South Korea, and UK. They contacted the hosters via the abuse-mail adresses and asked them to close down those child porn sites. Eight of the US hosters closed the sites within three hours of contact, 16 of the sites were closed within one day. Three sites were reported (truthfully) by hosters (after checking) to not contain child porn and not against any laws.
My question now is: If Childcare can do it, why not the mighty BKA (FBI of Germany)? I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway...
*sigh* - politicians really drive me crazy...
Re:Inc. China (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't speak for Germany, but in many leadership functions in the U.S., the very people who speak the loudest against any particular moral crime are the same ones who are actively engaged in such activity. This includes drugs, prostitution, child porn, being gay and just about anything else you might be able to think of. We've had just about every type at all levels of government, religious and social leadership out here and I can't imagine that this is anything but human behavior and that Germany is somehow less hypocritical than other humans in the world.
These constant pushes in these directions make me wonder what people are thinking? And by "these directions" I mean censorship, thought control, and 'victimless crimes' of all sorts. The fact that "things exist" in the world never screwed me up as a child nor as an adult. (Although, I really have to give my mother credit for not letting me use a knife or a fork until I was at least 8 to 10 years old... who knows how many eyes or fingers I would have lost through eating accidents!)
It doesn't prevent anyone from getting screwed up -- it just reminds them that their desires are perverse and gives them yet another reason not to seek help with their problems, often making them worse. (And no, I am not saying that gay people should "seek help" either... except, perhaps, when it comes to certain displays.)
Is it that our leadership is simply too immature to handle the facts that things they don't agree with happen in the world? Perhaps labelling various legislators as emotionally or mentally immature might be a useful approach to condemning such action.
Re:READ THIS! There is no protest! (Score:2, Insightful)
You're right.
I am also living in Germany, but the problem is that it's really difficult to do anything against these things.
I tried to be politically active, and even joined a party. But since I have a fulltime job, I don't have as much as time for political activism as I would like to and as others have. There are so many going-to-become-professional-politicians in those parties with really enough time (some of them have fulltime jobs, but in civil service or such, where they have enough time for politics), that you don't really get the slightest chance to get to the upper levels of the party.
You have to invest so much time that it's really nearly impossible to have a fulltime job and become a politician, who has the people's interest in his mind first and foremost.
In order to get to the top, you have to become a "Political Man", a Homo Politicus. You have to brown-nose, become a real a**hole to get there... And I decided that the price is not worth paying for changing a system which most people seem to accept as "well, good enough" and about which most people don't even give a shit...
And provided you reach the top, you have either become one of "them" or you can't really change anything because there are so many particular-interests, you have to keep brown-nosing so much, do horse-trading, tit-for-tat, that you really lose contact with the people...
Sorry for the rant, but saying "change the system" is easy, doing so is not. And as you said: Since most of the people don't care as long as they get something to eat and some entertainment (Panem et Circenses), they are happy and they don't want to change the system.
My suggestion? Try changing your "small world environment", i.e. help your friends, neighbours and relatives in circumventing such censorships, help them express their anger and inacceptance of the system and help them start to think...
Re:Inc. China (Score:2, Insightful)
Not entirely impossible, if you get told when you've reached a blocked IP you can verify whether that IP is actually CP or not.
Except that if the site really happens to contain CP, you'll do a criminal act by just deliberately loading it. And you'll have a hard time to argue that you didn't know that it contained CP.
Making Blacklists work (Score:3, Insightful)
There is one way to make a blacklist work & prevent it from being abused. Keep it private to where only law enforcement (not politicians) can use it. Make it Wikipedia style to log the time & date of changes made as well as the UID & IP person submitting the changes. Then if the changes made are later found out to be inconsistent with the goal of the blacklist, you *arrest* the submitter & charge them with *felony* unlawful access to a computer system. If they want to be have a police state we can show them that it can work both ways.
Re:Inc. China (Score:3, Insightful)
by 2012 at the very latest, the first politically incorrect forum is on the list
by 2014 all not officially sanctioned are forbidden by default
2020 all internet is white-list only, registry is by request of The Party only.
Re:Inc. China (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have concrete examples to mention? Are you sure that those examples are comparable to Germany and other European countries?
Re:READ THIS! There is no protest! (Score:2, Insightful)
I also live in Germany, and can share your view 100%: nobody is concerned here. I wonder however, if the reason is just because they don't understand the implications. For the regular person, this looks just like "they are doing something to fight child porn, and since child porn is bad and they're fighting it, it must be OK". The only way to change this situation is to get people to understand what's really going on, and that's a big challenge because the issues are not only complex but often highly technical.
Probably, the real problem is that achieving this requires really good communication skills, and this is something we geeks don't excell at. Looking around /., I see that many regular contributors here have an absolutely condenscending attitude towards "average Joes". But when dealing with issues such as this, which are essentially political, it is mostly average Joes who cast the votes, so you'd rather take them seriously and find a way to communicate with them.
Until we understand this and act accordingly, we'll continue to see the decisions we care about being made in the wrong direction by clueless or even ill-intentioned politians.
Re:What is it they say about systems and entropy? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have evidence that some company is poisoning your groundwater, get your neighbors together and create a negative PR shitstorm for them! Organize a boycott of the company's products. Inform media sources that carry the company's advertisements that you're going to boycott them as well. Engage in some civil disobedience.
Wow. You're desperately naive, aren't you?
First off, your average corporate conglomerate is so fucking big that no little advertising campaign or boycott will make one bit of difference.
And even if it did, what of it? They just move their operations to a neighbourhood where the people are too poor or destitute to raise a fuss. It's probably cheaper than trying to clean up their operations (yay negative externalities!).
They think that big government is the answer to all of the world's problems
And small-government weenies like yourself have the exact opposite problem: the belief that the government is never the answer.
Guess what? The truth lies somewhere in the middle. And I think your beloved, infallible Founding Fathers would agree if they could see the scope and power of corporations today, something they could never, in their wildest dreams, have imagined.