Slashdot Mirror
Deutsche Bahn to Sue Google
Many readers including this Anonymous Coward have written about this case: "After the DB-Deutsche Bahn (German railway comp.) won a case against Dutch ISP xs4all to remove 2 articles that were hosted on one of their servers, the DB now is going to sue Google (Wednesday) and probably in 2 days time Yahoo! and Altavista. Infoworld has an article about it. More background information about previous attempts to censor the same site can be found here and here's list of mirrors." And Yes, "Access is Forbidden."
There is freedom of speech in Germany, as part of the constitution. The main difference is that free speech is considered to be one of many rights, not "the #1 amendment", so it is more often weighted against other rights.
As we all know, once lawyers start to weigh and argue about things, anything can happen and right or wrong isn't really a matter anymore.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
-- Clare Booth Luce, 1903-1987
Second, imagine some radical group in the US. posting instructions on how to hijack some planes and fly them into skyscrapers on the internet. Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out?
There goes your "free speech"...
q.e.d.
Thank you and now mod me down to oblivion for beeing a german nazi or whatever!
First of all, you should read the article, it answers most of your questions.
They already asked google to take it down the hyperlinks and cached copies, but they didn't, so now they're suing
It's a tough situation : a handbook on how to destroy rail tracks is hardly worth fighting for - but even in those instances, freedom of speech must be absolute
but it sucks having to do it over some dangerous wingnuts' propaganda...
It actually is a much longer story (and more interesting), you can read it HERE
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
A spoon in the hands of the wrong person can be deadly too. We should ban spoons and any information about spoons.
A brick, and any information about making or using bricks, can be dangerous in the wrong hands too; we should ban everything about those as well.
Blocking a page about some idea to sabotage is not going to make such extremists go away or stop their actions.
It's just about control and power; and it's silly.
I won't get started about nuclear power stuff, but u talk about banning instructions of how to commit crimes. Crimes where? believe it or not, different countries have different laws. Alcohol is illegal in some Arab states; does that mean we should prohibit all home-brew websites? Free-speech is virtually a crime in China; so free speech activist sites should be banned. And even so, who is to say which laws are just? The Nazis made laws, ppl who broke them were severely punished; u reckon everyone should have blindly observed those laws just because they were laws?
Sorry, u cannot (logically nor practically) censor the web.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
>
....
Hu?
In wich world do you live?
German Constitution Article 5: Everybody has the right to distribute and express his OPINION freely as well as to inform himself freely. [...]
Note: free speach is expressing your OPINION. And it is getting free access to the OPINIONS of other people.
Free speach is NOT a detailed instruction in "HOW TO KILL PEOPLE", "HOW TO DESTROY OTHER PEOPLES PROPERTY" and "HOW TO RECRUIT TERRORISTS".
If a certain piece of paper with letters on it is free speach or an illegal encaurae of terrorism is a descission of a court.
I doub that you can call a descission of a court censorship.
Better you read the article, and make yourself an opinion, instead of jumping on the train of dumb comments
I fully support banning such stuff from the internet, exactly as I support banning child porn from the internet. But thats only my opinion.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then.
-- Tom Lehrer, MLF Lullaby
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
The point is, if you start saying that THIS is ok but THAT isn't, then you're immediately into a very dangerous area. Where do you stop? Where do you draw the line? Someone has to make the decision about what is "dangerous" to society, and what isn't. And ok, so there's a fairly black and white case to begin with (perhaps this one, perhaps not), and laws are passed with the best of intentions, but then - down the road, different people with different agendas then use these same laws and precedents to suppress something which may be much more shades-of-gray. The moment you have speech being censored by the government or (worse?) corporations, you have a VERY BAD situation which is GUARANTEED to be abused down the line. Much better to keep it open, and just live with the fact that in a free society, there will ALWAYS be a certain number of people saying unsavoury stuff, and you CANNOT suppress information like this. The more you try to suppress it, the more it will spread.
document is not illegal in Holland, and is the property of one of XS4ALL's customers. So far German authorities have not contacted XS4ALL, no official requests where made to remove these documents from our server.
I don't know about you, but it sounds like the documents in question are not illegal in the Netherlands (not much seems to be illegal in the netherlands).
Here is also a clip from the European Convention of Human Rights, article 10:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information an ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."
Now where is the 'not legal' part of all this? The only place i can see that happen is the party that is in Germany.. I haven't heard of this issue until today so I may not know all there is to know about it, but I did read parts of the article that don't seem to corrolate with what your saying...
Right, some links on a few search engines are better advertising than numerous news articles describing exactly what the blocked pages contain...
"There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there,"
Yeah, instructions on hacking railway systems are ok, but you'd better not post instructions describing how to open legally purchased documents "protected" by some form of "encryption."
I decided to post rather than mod...
It's VERY important to remember two things...
Security by obscurity is bad when dealing when computers because computers by their very nature makes it much easier to root out patterns and obscure points of interest.
Security by obscurity in the physical world is a de facto standard and is paramount to many security issues. For example, like it or not, our goverment uses plain-jane trucks to move radioactive elements, high explosives, deadly biological materials, and large volumes of currency throughout our nation.
By not having the routes, the trucking schedules and payload information, a high degree of security is available. This is exactly security through obscurity. Would you want this information to be available? I know I sure wouldn't.
Imagine the cost (because of the physical security requirements) and the greatly increased odds of something bad happening in the event that this information were generally known to the public. I can easily imagine bad things for any number of reasons if this were public information. Since it's not, everything from protects (increasing the odds of accidents) to terrorist attacks are avoided, and this is just the short list.
In short, in the real world, security through obscurity is not only important, it's paramount to our national security...don't believe me, ask NTSA, NSA, CIA and the FBI as well as just about any other law enforcement agency. It's only with computers that this should be avoided; as a rule of thumb...
By your logic the Allies in WWII were in the wrong for giving information on sabotage tactics to the French resistance. So much for supporting freedom fighters in tyranical nations.
This is the same basic flaw of logic that burdens the US's war on terror. According to the definition we are using (all non-government supported organized violence) our own founding fathers were terrorists.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
stereotyping germans as people who look away when evil is done is insulting
But nevertheless appropriate as far as stereotypes go.
Of course, being as it is this stereotype holds true for pretty much all the people in the world. We are a bunch of egoistic cowards after all.
We don't need Freedom of Speech protections to protect Aunt Helen's "I love puppies!" website. We don't need them to protect Ed Jones's "The Taliban suck" page. The wingnuts are the people testing the bounds of free speech, and they're the ones who let us know how much of it we can count on.
Some argue that people like this are actually a threat to speech, by inciting the government to crack down so regularly. Personally, I take the opinion that your average government would simply attempt to regulate even less controversial speech-- things like "steal music" or "this politician sucks"-- if they didn't have the wingnuts to keep them constantly tied up in court.
PS I realize we're talking about a private company, in a country without all of the free speech protections of the US. Nonetheless, speech protections are important to us all, and should be fought for no matter where they're threatened. Particularly on the net, where one country's silly laws can potentially be applied to everyone on the planet.
Actually, yes, the freedom of speech is the freedom to say such things. If the courts were to blacklist everytype of "terrorist" writings, where would it stop? How is this different from blacklisting Communism in the 50's and Herr McCarthy's banning of forms of thought? To say that freedom of speech only takes the curret fad of what is "good" does not mean it is freedom. It is subjectivism under which everyone is forced by law. The freedom of speech is all encroaching; it takes the "good" with the "bad" despite what people want to have censored.
On the other hand, guidebooks for destroying railroad tracks server no other purpose than destroying railroad tracks in attempts to disrupt the service, with the unfortunate possibility of killing people.
But then again, information in itself has never harmed anyone. What harms is the practical use of that information and that is what is and should be illegal. Not publishing the information.
If we banned all information on how to blow things up and how to murder evil dictators, how many books, movies and documentaries would not need to be banned? I for one think that is too high a price to pay for banning people like these from publishing their ideas on the internet. As far as I know, none of the ideas in their manifesto has been used yet. So, arrest the bad guys if they are really stupid enough to use the material.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Information has no will, people on the other hand often want information to be free.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Nice shot at a knee-jerk reaction.
What would I say to such a document? Post it. Link to it. Alert the media. Get CNN to do a cyber-scare article on it. Get people thinking about the state of security in their airports and the danger this represents.
Know why a group of people were able to seize guided missiles for the price of some flying lessons, airline tickets, and box cutters? It wasn't because box cutters are such a formidable weapon. It is because the passangers and crew of those airlines did not expect what was to come. Up to that point, hijackings tended to be isolated events that lead up to a police standoff on the ground. Most of the time, the majority of hijack victoms survived.
The passangers of Flight 93 quickly learned of the fate of other hijacked airlines that day thanks to mobile phones. With the cry of "let's roll" (accredited to Todd Beamer), the passangers of that flight attacked their captors. It cost them their lives as the entire flight went down in a field in western Pennsylvania. But their flight was the only one to not also crash in to a monument and take additional lives on the ground (authorities believe the flight was headed for a target in Washington).
The difference between Flight 93 and other doomed flights that day was a slim margin of knowledge. A realization that the threat was different than the past. Information.
If a group attempted the same tactic today (with box cutters, much less the nail-clippers being confiscated by airport security now), they would meet the same resistance. Additional attempts of airline terrorism (the shoe-bomber being a prime example) has lead to quick action by fellow passangers to subdue their would-be attacker.
What would a document called "10 easy ways to Hijack an airliner and slam it into a building" do? I can tell you what a lack of such a document didn't do - stop the events of 9/11 from happening.
In the US, nuclear materials are transported by road. Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if you posted accurate information on the route information, security procedures, and instructions on how to sabotage such a transport here. Do you really believe the FBI wouldn't be knocking on your door? In the current climate, you'd probably simply disappear in some US "holding cell" somewhere, not to be heard from for months or years.
GOD.
Or other deity of your choice.
Your post smells of troll, but I'll bite...
You compared child porn to documents instructing how to commit terrorism - there is a major difference between the two.
If I wrote a game that virtually depicted a school massacre, it would be in poor taste - but legal nonetheless. Same as if I wrote a flight simulator that gave you points for crashing planes into buildings and killing people. This is akin to publishing information about how to commit terrorism.
Now on the other hand, if I personally went on a school massacre, somehow managed to survive, and used the footage as part of a game - that wouldn't be legal, it would be exhibit A.
50K died in vietnam.
How many in all our other wars (about every 20 years).
They died defending free speech and the constition.
Now, we lose 3K in 1 incident and suddenly the republican party wished to remove any and all free speech in the name of a security that we can never have?
If you think that airports are secure, let me come on board with a small vial of airbourne microbes. Perhaps, some airbourne yersinia pestis. a simple virus
Perhaps a modified bacteria that will release botulinum toxin in its later growth.
Or perhaps release a bit of botulinum toxin into the h2o supply for a town.
Security is something that we will never have no matter how much we try.
There will always be a way to defeat any system given enough time.
Why? Because there are some things more important than the war against terrorism, but Ascroft and his cronies don't see it.
Play Command HQ online
Then you go on to blatantly pervert the concept of free speech. Free Speech does need to be associated with destruction and killing. Free Speech is absolute, it's the implementations that require (out of practicality) some restrictions.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This is more of a general rant than about the specifics of this case, but since the discussion has veered into general free speech issues, I think it's appropriate.
Thanks to the DMCA and similar restrictions, publishing information on cracking dongles (hardware keys for software) is basically illegal. Concrete details on how to crack a dongle definately is. The people putting up information on cracking dongles usually do so for the sole purpose of encouraging others to use illegal copies of software. Clearly the dominant use of this information is criminal.
So what's the harm in censoring this speech?
Well, several years ago I was asked to investigate adding copy protection to a new software product (now defunct). My initial research focused on "respectable" publications on the subject. I found almost nothing useful. If the information I found was to be believed, dongles were practically impossible to defeat. So I extended my search to cracker sites. Now I found something. I discovered that all dongle technologies have been defeated on a case by case basis. I discovered which dongle technologies were trivial to defeat and which were very hard to defeat. I learned specific, concrete weaknesses and arguments for and against dongles. With this information I was able to provide solid information for my employers to use to make a decision.
Let's say that the information on dongle cracking had been removed from the web. Well, my research would have been mostly fruitless. I would have had to largely rely on the misleading claims of the manufacturers themselves and reviews that didn't make serious attempts to defeat the dongles. However, the crackers would still have access to the information, passed around via instant messaging, password protected ftp, email, and other techniques. Dongles would still be insecure, but I wouldn't be able to make reasoned decisions about them.
Please, don't forget that those examples are not limitations of speech. They are limitations of acts that may be commited through the mechanism of speech. It would be perfectly legal to yell "Fire" in an ampitheatre being used for a lecture at a firefighters convention. I see naked children on TV regularly, but they're not being sexually exploited - they're in diaper commercials. Libel and slander are just that - libel and slander, not any particular speech.
We make laws against inciting riots, exploitation of children, and spreading malicious untruths about people. We do not directly limit speech. This is an important disinction that too few people recognize.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Obviously Deutsche Bahn isn't too Internet savvy, or they would know that this only causes the information to spread even further. They cases only cost Google money, quite sad really. I'm sure it will be thrown out of court. There have TXT files on the Internet (and way back to the BBS age) detailing how to do just about everything such as creating your own explosives. Only criminals will use the information for illegal activities, since when is having the information illegal? What's this world coming too...
There's nothing that's not offensive to somebody out there, the question is whether or not to let that silence all culture.
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
A couple of remarks:
- the church of scientology bitched mightily against the German government because it removed it's religious non-profit tax status to replace it with a for-profit organization status. They love money remember. The church of scientology is being observed by the "Verfassungsschutz" (lit. = federal agency for the protection of the constitution) because it's been established by court that it has near-totalitarian goals (i.e. domination) that threatens the constitution. Other than that it operates just as freely as in the US (they bugged me, I've had their material in my mailbox, etc.).
- this is a Perl world: there's more than one way to do it (I mean democracy here). The US constitution works fine for Americans, the German constitution works fine for Germans, etc. A constitution reflects the preferences and experiences of the people who live with it (and ultimately write it). There isn't any such thing as a supremely democratic and freedom-maximizing constitution, as the many rights we enjoy collide frequently. Therefore, your sentence "it makes me grateful that I live where I live, despite its many problems" applies to many countries, and to my understanding it means that you like the constitution you live with. That's great.
when I read of other 'progressive' governments (read: Great Britain, Germany, Canada. Not Pakistan, Peru, etc.) doing away with the rights that I take for granted (and enjoy reading about and taking part in the free exercise thereof) I am quite startled
So, what rights do you have in the US that I don't have in the UK? At least I can discuss ROT-13 in a public place without getting sent to jail.
One thing that seems to keep getting missed in all of this, is that Google has offices in Germany, conducts business in Germany, and should therefore make sure that they don't violate the laws in Germany. Seriously, if you are going to have a presence in a country, you shouldn't go flaunting their laws, just because its legal in your home country.
By way of disclosure, I am an American, and the thought of this sort of limitation on what Google can link to is distasteful to me; however Google has offices in Germany, and Germany has laws preventing this sort of thing. So, if a German court decides that Google was wrong in what they did, Google should suffer the consequences. End of Story. If you don't like the laws of a country, don't set up operations there, its that simple. I would expect US based companies to follow German laws, if they have a presence there, and I would expect German companies to follow US laws if they have a presence here(Russian companies too!). The only time I would expect a company to be exempt from a law, is if they don't have a physical presence. As such, I could post a copy of the offending article, and be relativly safe, as long as I stay out of Germany. And a German national could crack the CD protections of the RIAA, and be realtively safe, as long as they stay out of the US. Its either that, or a lot of people need to start preparing a hell of a legal defence for violating Shira law by viewing porn.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.