A Black Day For Internet Freedom In Germany 420
Several readers including erlehmann and tmk wrote to inform us about the dawning of Internet censorship in Germany under the usual guise of protecting the children. "This week, the two big political parties ruling Germany in a coalition held the final talks on their proposed Internet censorship scheme. DNS queries for sites on a list will be given fake answers that lead to a page with a stop sign. The list itself is maintained by the German federal police (Bundeskriminalamt). A protest movement has formed over the course of the last several months, and over 130K citizens have signed a petition protesting the law. Despite this, and despite criticism from all sides, the two parties sped up the process for the law to be signed on Thursday, June 18, 2009."
Easily circumvented? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that easy circumvention of a bad law makes it okay, but as a practical measure wouldn't it be easy to just use a DNS server in a different country? Or is Germany planning on firewalling all DNS queries except those from 'official' servers?
What are they censoring? (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember back a year or so, when the .alt newsgroup was taken down because something like 1% of the newsgroups in that domain had child pornography on them? You might as well have gotten rid of the whole internet because people could have found child porn there. It doesn't make sense.
I would have expected something like this "DNS blacklist" in Iran or China. But Germany??
This sounds like censorship for the sake of censorship
What's Next? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then we start with those older folks suffering from dementia?
Then we go on next to those who committed felonies?
Finally, making it a requirement for all people who want to work, buy groceries, etc?
What's next?
Re:Gigaton Fail - (Score:5, Interesting)
Or browse like the Iranians. There's currently a pretty decent number of people helping set up proxies around the world for use in Iran. Austin Heap [twitter.com] managed to setup some VPN servers on gigabit-ethernet.
I'm working on a Virtual Appliance that runs Squid, Tor, Polipo+Tor, ziproxy & ssh for use by people who don't quite know how to setup squid for themselves or want to sandbox it.
Re:the wall (Score:5, Interesting)
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
brothels? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's Next? (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't believe its at all the will of the people, on this one.
its a power grab for the gov, plain and simple.
germans tend to be technical, detail oriented and saavy and there is no way I can believe the population would WANT this.
Re:Gigaton Fail - (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, most people here would agree that police states are bad. But on the other hand they would say that there are exceptions (child pornography, terrorism etc.). And of course "our politicians would never do something really wrong!!!"
People in Germany live in a rich land which has last experienced war 64 years ago - so most people see it for granted that they will always live in a democracy, where their freedom is guaranteed.
Intellectually they know that in other countries this isn't so, but if you personally never experienced something else, then it is hard to imagine that this might change. And because they fail to grasp the fact that their freedom and their rights could be endangered they see no reason to defend it.
Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... (Score:2, Interesting)
germans tend to be technical, detail oriented and saavy
You must be talking about a different Germany from the one I live in. Most Germans have no clue about modern tech.
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you really think that the government doesn't know about other DNS servers?
Yes, after some TV magazine report, I know that they don't think that far.
Blocking people from getting there is not the point. Intimidation, and getting the people used to this kind of government, is the real point.
Besides: Who stops you from using another port, and encrypting the data trough a VPN? Hell, my router can do that. Trough a simple web-interface. I don't need to change anything on my pc. It's done in 5 minutes. Now if you offer me an offshore DNS server with a VPN, a good connection, and just the price of keeping it running, you will have a client. (Those free ones are too slow, and the others that you buy are way too expensive, because they want to profit big time from it.)
I smell a nice non-profit business model here. Especially since half the world can be your clients.
As long as they don't go to war against our small island full of servers, and as long as they do still allow data into the net, we can circumvent their censorship. And offer the whole world to do so too, in one click (insert USB stick, run autostart, click OK, done).
I wonder how one could protect those servers better, even in case of attacks? :D
Hey, I know it: Infect the censorship servers *themselves*!
Who wants to apply for a well-payed job in this emerging censorship-server-market? :)
If we storm them, all of us will pretty much be moles. Meaning we can perfectly disable the censorship proxies/routers for users with our special client patch.
My god, and they thought they could stop *us all*. They can't even stop me alone.
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you really think that the government doesn't know about other DNS servers?
Yes, after some TV magazine report, I know that they don't think that far. Blocking people from getting there is not the point. Intimidation, and getting the people used to this kind of government, is the real point.
I can reinforce that. The music industry is already calling on the government to include filesharing and torrent networks.
So you can see where they're heading...
Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... (Score:2, Interesting)
From my time living in Germany and my own knowledge of German history, I can tell you a few things. First of all, Germans do not seem to have the innate distrust of government that most people in the US have. This is true even after what they went through with the Nazi's in WWII, and culturally I think it comes from the fact that up until the end of the 19th century, there was no "Germany" to speak of but just a bunch of small fiefdoms that argued and fought with each other. Over the centuries, Germany had been used as the stomping ground where other big powers like England, France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia went to fight wars. The 30 Years War is perhaps the most famous example. This led the Germans to want to have a strong central government to give Germany an identity.
Because of this background, notions like individual liberty and fear of the government never really took sway in Germany. Even today when every single school child has to be taught about the Holocaust at length (I even saw a bunch of them when I visited Dachau), they really are not being taught the most important lesson of the Holocaust. The Germans basically say: Hey don't lock up Jews in concentration camps and kill them! Which is obviously a very good lesson, but it misses the deeper underlying point: The real lesson should be: Hey, don't ever let the government grow so powerful that it can trample the individuals inalienable rights, and don't ever let the so-called needs of the many (the poor "churlens" in this case) violate the rights of the individual. I can guarantee that this idea is not respected by Germans in the same way it is in the US. Ironically, the Germans who are most likely to rebel against this are likely the same ones who rebelled against the old DDR back during the Cold War. The people who have seen tyrrany at its worst are more likely to protest a loss of liberty than the ones who are going to lose the liberty the first time.
Re:Mein Herr! (Score:1, Interesting)
Before you get on ze net, ve neet to zee your papers. Your papers, bitte.
First, switch to Open DNS, second, vote the bastards out. Keep voting the bastards out until you get your bastards in there.
This doesn't word because well... the vast majority of people are idiots. They are more impressed by infantile rhetoric than by actual forward thinking. The free thinkers (non-idiots) of the world should just band together and form our own nation in the South Pacific, where you have to score 115 or higher on a standard IQ test to be allowed in. Seriously, the idiots are ruining it for the rest of us, they don't know their @$$ from a hole in the ground and we all get to suffer for it. Granted I know this is in Germany and not America, but these things have a tendency to come around (Hey look, Internet censorship worked out great in Germany, let's try it here!! :-D!!!!) Ugh...
Re:The real discouraging thing (Score:2, Interesting)
Wait for the next election, elect some other party into the majority and hope they actually behave differently? Just seems like every year things get worse, no matter who's in office.
I, too find it very frustrating that allmost all political discussion these days seems to be about adding more restrictions in every field: Internet censorship, Smoking bans, Keeping minors from drinking, "Killerspiele", "Umweltzonen", etc... Trading freedoms for percieved security.
At least when it comes to free-speech and online rights, my hope lies in the pirate party. Maybe we can follow the swedes (they did get 7.1% at the EU elections in sweden - just 0.9% in germany so far). I don't expect enough people to vote them to have any significant influence any time soon, but if their polls go up to a few percent, the politicians can't help noticing that ignoring these matters is going to cost them votes, and we might see more critical reflection of these issues in mainstream political discussion.
Re:Sigh... (Score:3, Interesting)
insane politicians (Score:4, Interesting)
When you read up a little on the history, views and personalities of the main politicians involved in this - Ursula von der Leyen and Wolfgang Schäuble - you find out quickly that they are both almost certainly borderline insane.
Schäuble is suffering from PTSD since that failed attack on him many years back. His medical records are kept secret.
von der Leyen is either a fanatic or crazy. The amount of disconnect from reality she displays certainly has a medical term, but I can't recall it right now. She's acting like the guy who insists on being Napoleon no matter what evidence to the contrary you come up with. You could show her a room full of scientific studies disproving each and every word she's ever said on the matter - and she wouldn't change her course one inch.
Quite frankly, these people are dangerous and criminally insane.
Re:Before we use the 'police state' meme again... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not the germans' trust in their government that is weird. It's the americans' distrust in their. Maybe it has something to do with how fucked up their election process is and how often their politicians screw them over?
The petition is still open, everyone(!) can sign (Score:2, Interesting)
By law, everybody(!) can sign, regardless of age, nationality, place of residence, etc.
There's a step-by-step guide plus video (in English) on how to sign the petition if you don't understand German: http://www.piratenpartei-bayern.de/Signing_the_e-petition_for_Non-Germans [piratenpartei-bayern.de] - also some more info is on the digg article: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Official_Petition_against_German_Internet_censorship [digg.com]
Also, the petition system's servers suck, and the system is badly implemented. They barely sustained random link traffic, Slashdot will probably reduce it to a smouldering pile of ash. But, post away!
More information can also be found on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=netzsperren+OR+Zensursula+-RT [twitter.com]
The main petitioner twitters at http://twitter.com/FranziskaHeine [twitter.com]
Petition statistics are available at http://sejmwatch.info/petition-internet-zensur.html [sejmwatch.info] (in German)
Re:alternative dns servers; (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, because that caching nameserver just magically pulls its DNS info out of thin air...
Err, yes? Or rather, it starts with the root servers, which is as good as anything gets. Certainly better than OpenDNS, which isn't above manipulating answers.
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I'm getting a few replies pointing out examples of government policies to block certain dissidents. I think you'll find, however, that these policies to block dissidents have another side to them, where the expression of such dissidence is, itself, considered offensive (especially the hate speech). So, while I admit what I said was incorrect, I'd like to make a new argument, one that's closer to what I meant.
I meant that censoring dissidents is rarely, in a functioning democracy (yes Hognoxious, that includes the UK), a policy of a government exclusively. If they do censor dissidents, it is, more often than not, a product of the people the government represents. If they are so offended by Holocaust deniers, and the distress they cause, that they wish to censor them, then the government will likely comply. I have yet to see a democratic government actually manage to usurp their own people in these matters, especially post WWII.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying you should be more worried about your fellow man, rather than the mother of all scapegoats, the government.
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:3, Interesting)
When are we going to start countering the current trend?
When the tech-hostile ultraconservative 60-somethings from whom the parties that bring up such laws draw the majority of their voters have died off. The CDU/CSU parties which pushed this horrendous law is highly popular amongst people over 60 [ptrace.fefe.de] with low education [ptrace.fefe.de]. (Source: Zeit.de [www.zeit.de], screenshots courtesy of this excellent blog [blog.fefe.de])
And I suspect the situation in other countries to be similar. Those people do not understand what the Internet is and how it works, and they have an unwavering trust in the state and government. A terrible combination.
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:3, Interesting)
Tor will bypass all their logging. Presumably they know this, but I'm not sure how they intend to fight it.
In the UK Freedom of Information requests have been made on the subject, but no response so far.
Even more worrying is what happens when sites from the list leak out. Even if we don't have the full list, as soon as someone visits a blocked site they can note the URL. Then all they need to do is send you an email with an in-line image link pointing to said site (or a hidden image on another site, an iframe etc), and you end up on the paedophile suspect list.
Re:I know the feeling. (Score:3, Interesting)
actually, most senior techs here handle these requests whenever they come in. we're all cleared to handle sensitive data.
What I was talking about wouldn't be classified as sensitive it would be secret and probably would run on it's own machine but maybe your right and your elected officials really are as stupid as you say they are. But then that really says something about Denmark doesn't it?
Well, I'm Danish, i follow the news and specifically politics regarding IT. You know, being a normal, concerned citizen in the country i reside in
So you support DNS filtering? and you support your Politicians even though they are stupid? On the one hand it sounds like you are proud of your country and on the other hand it sounds like you think your government is incompetent and thus hate your country. You should like the Danish version of an American redneck.
oh, and groups like http://www.sslug.dk/ [sslug.dk] often do pop-quiz our politicians about certain issues, usually before elections
As I told your friend, who also used the phase 'Machiavellian surveillance' a few messages down, politicians tell people what they want to hear not the truth. If they told the truth they would never get elected in the first place.
but this is Denmark we're talking about.
Yes.. Yes it is... land of the free, waffles and internet censorship... To protect the children!
Denmark's biggest Internet service provider TDC A/S launched a DNS-based child pornography filter on 18 October 2005 in cooperation with the state police department and Save the Children, a charity organization. Since then, all major providers have joined and as of May 2006, 98% of the Danish Internet users are restricted by the filter.[47] The filter caused some controversy in March 2006, when a legal sex site named Bizar.dk was caught in the filter, sparking discussion about the reliability, accuracy and credibility of the filter.[48] Also, as of 18 October 2005, TDC A/S has blocked access to AllOfMP3.com, a popular MP3 download site, through DNS filtering.[49] 4 February 2008 a Danish court has ordered the Danish ISP Tele2 to shutdown access to the filesharing site thepiratebay.org for all its Danish users.[50]