German State Alters DNS To Censor Web Sites [updated]

Rabenwolf writes: "In the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the first ISP (ISIS Multimedia) has given in to pressure from the state government and has started to block foreign websites with supposedly "illegal content" by changing the corresponding DNS entries. ISIS customers trying to access these sites are redirected to the website of the local government. ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia will have to pay a fine if they continue to provide access to sites with "illegal content" through their DNS servers. It's not as bad as China or Saudi-Arabia, but it makes you think... An article from the heise newsticker is here, and if you don't sprechen Deutsch, Google might help." Update: 11/22 15:23 GMT by T : As sqrt points out, this report is misleading: "A single technican altered the DNS Entries to demonstrate it is possible. His changes were already reversed. Heise already posted a new story about this today."

Comments

Pathetic attempt

[kieran]

Anyone finding themselves redirected can use any number of simple DNS tools to find out the real IP (by querying a root server, then the authorative server), then simply access the site by IP rather than FQDN. This may sound a little technical for Johann average, but not when simple instructions are made available to them.

(This would not work with sites that rely on HTTP1.1 to tell them the name of the site, so that many sites can be hosted on a single IP, but that is less widely used than it might be.)

I don't 'sprechen' GoogleDeutsch either :-(

[Mike Connell]

(From Google)
The entrance offerers had questioned thereby whether the entrance to unpleasant, abroad can be prevented gehosteten Websiten at all effectively.

I think I might as well just learn German ;-)

Site-Restriction Already retracted

[absolut_kurant]

according to this article on heise, the restriction is no longer in effect. According to the press officer, a technician did it on his own and not in accordance with company policies.

Different places have different ideas

[SmileyBen]

I really hope people actually think about this before replying about how this is simply wrong. Different countries have different ways of dealing with things. In America, for example, Freedom of Speech is enshrined in law - this gives an enormous amount of protection to citizens from their government, which is good, but also ensures the right of racists and others to say what they like, and recruit new members. In other countries, they frequently take a different approach, and for example consider protecting minorities from hate speech to be more important than letting everyone say whatever they like.

I wish people would understand that these are simply different ways of going about things, and certainly each has its own advantages and disadvatages. I don't honestly think, for example, that one groups is simply correct about gun ownership - perhaps America /is/ correct to claim that citizens need to be able to assert control, and not be powerless against their own government, but there are clear disadvatages. The same with speech - given no censorship, and no ability to assert local laws over internet content has major disadvantages, as well as the obvious advantages.

Re:Different places have different ideas

[Skapare]

and as long as only hate speech and Nazi propaganda are banned, things are fine.

But once you have the mechanism in place to enforce whatever is banned, it becomes easy to do so. Let some time pass and people are comfortable with it. Now something more can be banned and it will have a little resistance but with time that settles down. Wait for some troubling times, as Germany suffered right after World War ONE, and things are ripe ... and the mechanism is in place ... to let the Nazis or other ill-intent groups have their way.

Another example

[Syberghost]

Hopefully, the folks who kneejerk respond to stories about similar abuses in the US with "hah hah, the US sucks, come live in a real country" will keep this and similar problems (such as the French encryption policies and Yahoo lawsuit) in mind.

The Internet is shaking up the status quo globally, and the assaults on our freedom of speech to stop it are similarly global. If the US removes it's citizens' freedom, it affects you, whether you're in Georgia the state or Georgia the country.

anti-hate-speech laws focus on the wrong thing

[fhwang]

Anti-hate-speech laws, whether in Germany or Francs or the U.S., seem to be predicated on the idea that the speech itself has some sort of magical power over people's minds. I think that's very wrong, and it distracts attention from where it's needed most.

A number of different groups would have you believe that the swastika was this magical symbol that automatically turned rational people into genocidal creatures: All you do is hide the swastikas and everything's okay. Remember that the Holocaust had a very specific economic and political context: For a number of reasons, the German people had endured one of the worst economic declines ever to be suffered by an industrialized nation, and they were terrified and desperate. This does not excuse what happens, but it gives a much more sensible explanation than what normally passes for historical analysis -- "We need to keep the images of swastikas away from impressionable white kids", or "Germans are just a racist people", or similar pap.

So now Germany has a problem with skinheads (though it tends to get blown way out of proportion because the rest of the world watches the country very carefully). So why is that? Is that because German teenagers can get their hands on albums by talentless oi-skinhead bands? Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the reunification of Germany has been fraught with all sorts of economic and political stresses, and there are too many scared, uneducated, hopeless Germans who are looking for a scapegoat.

Of course, when it comes to what a politician can do about it, there's really no option at all, is there? Either he can stand up and say "We should work hard to make sure that everybody has good economic opportunities" -- and be branded as some stuck-in-the-past Marxist -- or he can point fingers and say "Let's keep Nazi images off the internet!"

List of blocked sites.

[Cryus]

The Caos Computer Club has a transcript of the letters sent to the ISPs by the Government. They demanded the blocking of: front14.org, stormfront.org, nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com for illegal nazi-content (which is illegal in Germany for historical reasons) and rotten.com As a site that uses pictures undermining the dignity of man and endangering the youth. I'd personaly - as a german citizen - prefer to see more money spent on media-education so people could make an informed decision about good and bad links to follow than on this campaign that opens doors to censorship (which is against our constitution btw.)

Sites NOT blocked anymore

[Rabenwolf]

As somebody else said already, the story was retracted after I submitted it. Apparently a technician changed the DNS entries without authorization from his superiors to demonstrate how easily it could be circumvented. But the state government is still trying to get the ISPs to adapt these measures. Read more about it here.

Fragmenting the namespace?

[fhwang]

It looks like this has already been retracted. Still, it's interesting to imagine the possible ramifications.

If a country implemented DNS blocking like this as a long-standing policy, it's easy to imagine people trying all sorts of technical fixes to get around it. People would set up their own "All Hate DNS", or maybe they'd distribute .hosts files with lists of blocked domains ...

But once you're doing that, why even use the old domain name? If you had www.killalljews.com resolving through the "All Hate DNS", wouldn't you also want www.killalljews.hate, and www.finalsolution.now, and everything else?

It introduces the possibility of a conflicting, though smaller, namespace, being overlaid on the DNS -- one more step towards fragmenting the namespace. Not that such fragmentation is necessarily a good thing, but it sure would be interesting to watch ...

It gets worse

[YKnot]

Now that ISIS has stopped blocking the sites under massive objection from free speech advocates, the local government has released a press statement in which they claim that ISIS gave in to racist pressure. Guess we're all nazis now because we didn't want to allow our government to take the easy route to complete content control.
The statement is here: Pressemitteilung 467/2001 der Bezirksregierung Düsseldorf vom 22.11.2001

Isolated case

[mseeger]

This is only an isolated case. Till now, there is *NO* consensus between the ISPs and the law enforcers.

I had a lot of meetings with the BKA (something like the german FBI) about fighting criminality in the internet. And they underestimate scale and complexity of the net.

I give you one example. There is a software called PERKEO. PERKEO is able to checksum files quickly and has an internal database of known checksums of child pornography images. They argued, that most child pornography images (which are exchanged through the internet) are well known. Somewhat like 95+% shell be in the database.

In the discussion with the ISPs they argued, that it would be easy to add PERKEO to the proxy server. For every image accessed, the checksum is created and compared with the database. In case the checksum matches, the access is blocked.

When i tried to explain, that the introduction would only result in countermeasure (automatic modification of images), it was taken as unwillingness.

Every meeting (i know about) ended with the same results: Everyone is willing to fight criminals, but the is no modus operandi. The law enforcement agencies have wishes the ISPs do not consider compatible with the law and constitution.

Some politicians and law enforcers are growing more and more frustrated. So a state (Nordrhein- Westfalen) tries to work with laws that put more responisbility on the shoulders of the ISPs.

This generates confusion and the confusion results in such events like the one discussed.

CU, Martin

Re:Censorship isn't a "different idea"

[SmileyBen]

Could someone tell me, does this guy *actually* not understand that the first amendment doesn't cover Germany, or, er, did he just vote for Bush?

Re:Will this teach slashdot editors?

[YKnot]

The update needs an update: the blocking continues, just not ISIS but other providers, ISIS does not seem to be very open about what has really happened and according to our local government almost all who protested are are probably nazis.