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."
Here's Google's cache of the broken link.
Google's defense: I know NOTH-ing. I see NOTH-ing. I hear NOTH-ing...
Germans will believe that, right?
Are there people related to scientologists? :P
OTOH, these are very legal concerns that the linked pages contain information that, in the hands of the wrong party could be dangerous to their operations, and being a public utility, they have to be concerned.
This is iteresting because it has dire implications on page linking in general.
Return the bells of Balangiga.
So, when is Google pulling its offices out of Germany in order to avoid this lawsuit? A company such as Google should not operate in a country where free speech is not lawful.
mbbac
"Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
Have these people not been paying attention lately?
Could somebody who had a chance to see these articles tell us what they were about? Maybe at least this way we could understand what DB don't want us reading?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I assume if they're sucessful with sueing Google, then they'll go after the Wayback Machine's archive of the site next
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
Just to clarify its not just the cache, its actually the links and its not to their site but articles that detail how to cut power on parts of the railway system.
Its not *their* site they want removing.
no sig.
Just more proof that there is no perfect country. The US has problems, Canada has problems, UK, Germany, France, Spain, and every other major country you can name has problems.
So here in the US we have to deal with the DMCA and the like (which we are unfortunatly pushing on everyone else). Germany just bans free speech, which at least in the US we consider golden.
Or is only in the US that we consider useless speech like this worth protecting. I wouldn't be surprized, and I can see the point, even though I disagree (that is it is worth pretecting despite being useless)
Notice that DB is not suing Google in an American court, citing that they would probably not be successful due to our freedom of speech laws....interesting juxtaposition with our constant bashing of other countries (NZ for ex) in limiting their citizens access/freedom to speech and info.... Here's to Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista -- stick to your guns!!!
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Too bad its apache, for if it was IIS then I could just hack in...
Save money- vote Republican
...that by attacking sites like this, they are simply drawing MORE attention to what they are trying to shut down?
By now dozens of people have mirrored the site, and the possibility of it going away forever has diminished greatly.
Fools.
no
If they don't comply with a German request, the 1st SS Panzer Division will be rolling through the streets of Amsterdam in 24 hours.
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
They're suing to get Google to remove the cache of someone else's pages.
Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit!
I'm fairly certain that google mentions on the site, that to have your pages removed from thier DB, you jsut have to send them an email with your URL and asking to bt removed....
These pages are not from Deutsche Bahn themselves but from a private person, who, I'm pretty sure is not prepared to send such a request to Google.
Just a little point, but I think that only applies if you want Google to remove your own pages. I don't think you can just ask them to take down links to pages you don't like.
In this case, Deutsche Bahn is trying to censor a website hosted on a Dutch server, who's content is perfectly legal under Dutch law (IANAL, and I've not studied the pages in question, but as far as I'm aware).
I'm not going to argue the (stupid) merits of the lawsuit, but why Yahoo? Yahoo isn't a search engine anymore than Microsoft's DNS error page is. It's powered by Google. If suing Google gets Google to fix the issue they have, then it'll be summarily fixed on Yahoo's page as well. Yahoo just plain has nothing to do with this, outside of using Google's search tool.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
it seems pretty silly to me. why solve the problem at the level of a search engine. it makes more sense to block the sites themselves (as they did with the xs4all pages), since people will find the pages eventually, even without the almighty google.
l
this case is stupid anyway, since the pages have been on the xs4all server for 4/5 years already*, and now they started to complain all of the sudden.
* link (in dutch) http://www.xs4all.nl/nieuws/overzicht/radikal.htm
Surely the people who DB should be sueing are those that host the content, rather than those which point at it? - But then we all know how it is with caching these days? The content could probably be pulled yet the mirros/ caches would be lting around for a while.
... I expect from a corporate view they have to be seen to be protecting their customers. A court case is probably far cheaper than upgrading the carriages on the railway.
As for it being quick, well DB suffered a lot of bad press from a 'couple' (definately one really bad accident that I remember) of accidents and they are the target for green activists on a yearly basis so
that's as true today as it was the first time it was spoken...
obviously DB can't ask nicely for *other peoples pages* to be removed - google would remove the pages if the terrorists* asked to, but not if the target of the terrorism asked. So they have to ask using lawyers. (* = supporters of direct action if you prefer to be more precise). But moving radioactive stuff around the country is going to cause controversy whether it is via train, truck (even scarier!) or barge. All of those crash at times.
As far as I can tell, the site may refer to transport of Nuclear Waste Material via Train across Germany. There has been massive demonstrations against this before in Germany. Possibly they details Deutsche Bahnhof's schedules, movement plans etc. - I can see why DB wouldn't want that published.
In the UK, the train movements from power stations etc. are available and are on regular schedules. The security around them isn't very high, but then the flask the material is carried in weighs quite a few tons, is solid steel, and you'd need an extremely expensive facility just to open it again.
Can a lawsuit really be filed for linking to material that no longer exists on a server (xs4all)? I would expect, at *MOST* that there would be a demand to remove the links, but since the material has been removed anyhow, I don't see the point. THe google bot will get rid of its link at some point.
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
-- Clare Booth Luce, 1903-1987
Interesting. THey want to sue Google and altavista etc for linking to illegal content. Does that mean that people linking to google will be next, and then those who link to those who link to google. Before long they will have to sue themselves. This could get very silly
-- Vagnerr - (www.vagnerr.com) Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Nope, the content is not legal. That's why DB successfully sued the ISP in the Netherlands. Now they want Google links and caches to be removed as well.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Will they sue the Internet Archive too? I'm not sure if this contains links to the offending rail sabotage information (I'm a stupid USian), but I would just guess that it does.
my god, it was more than half a century ago.
i don't care if i burn karma this way, i just find your "sense of humour" distasteful. bah!
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...
..and order by law.
Deutsche Bahn - wasn't that the "Deutsche Reichbahn" half a century ago, who used deported Jews and Eastern Europeans to build their railroads for nothing?
If only I could give back my German citizenship. Anybody wants to have it for 1,- Euro? For 50 cents?? For a quarter???
they're a threat to innocent citizens.
Posting instructions of how to commit crimes (sabotage in this case) should be prohibited across boarders. The poloitical background of this is that there is a very fierce anti-nuclear-power movement in germany supportet by 'left' activists.
Think of Greenpeace activists with no mind about inocent third parties and you'll get the picture.
I hate the "Bahns" miserable missmanagement (I use the train on a regular basis here in germany) and I shure as hell oppose to nuclear power but none the less, these people are criminals and they are a shame to peacefull resitance against "Atomkraft".
Sueing a searchengine is of course somewhat of a twist, but I hope this can raise and clarify some issues concerning morally doubtfull internet content and at least leverage trans-european law for this. I might help to know that the german gouverment holds large shares of the "Deutsche Bahn".
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It actually is a much longer story (and more interesting), you can read it HERE
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
stereotyping germans as people who look away when evil is done is insulting, whether you encapsulate it into a reference to Hogans Heroes or not.
However this is the country where you can get denied the vote (a few years ago) or locked up just depending on your ancestry (afghan is not a good one to have at the moment) so I'm not sure the constitution is always followed 100%. Hey, according to the constitution you have not been at war since Korea (?), but there are a lot of dead people who might disagree (well, if they weren't dead of course!)
Of course, if the govt. of a country was sneaky, they could publish bomb-making manuals themselves, with a few slight minor mistakes in them ;-)
I'm reading the article and I get to the part where the German says "... and we don't want that."
And I say out loud, "Yeah, well fuck you."
My wife, who was sitting next to me, got a little upset. Gotta stop talking to my computer...
-Russ
Me
If they had sensitive documents that were harmful to the company what were they doing on a public web server with read permissions and no access restrictions in the first place? _I_ think the company should be liable to pay legal charges and damages to Google.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Giving google 2 days to respond? It probably takes Deutsche Post more than 2 days to deliver the letter!
I hate to stir up a hornet's nest here, but with all the anit-terrorist paranoia around the world, this will have the American government screaming "terrorism" and we'll see Uncle Sam's B-52s, and not the Panzer Division, heading in the direction of Google's offices, not the mention Radikal's offices. But seriously, freedom of speech might get a kick in the butt if the American anti-terrorist campaign gets on the side of the German railway, and teams up against Google.
Veni, vidi, vici.
next on the list is Slashdot, and anyone else that has run this story, link to a story that links to the story about....
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
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!
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...
you have the right to describe how to kill someone (free speech) and the right to possess the means to do so (bear arms).
unfortunately you don't have the right to live, since that was just in the preamble :-)
The german (and european) courts have to balance these, which is the (intractable) root cause of the problems (and gives policitians and judges lots of wriggle room).
Yeah, anything except links to instructions on how to unlock a copy-protected DVD that you've purchased for viewing on your home computer.
Subtext: Geez. If only those darned Americans would restrict speech even further and cooperate with the rest of the world, we wouldn't have to sue them here in Germany...
But they only try to ban web pages about sex and how to decrypt DVDs. Why don't they get with the program and ban more stuff!
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
In other news, www.xs4all.nl will change to www.xs4allexceptcertainanarchistpublications.nl to represent recent events.
Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:
As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.
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 already noticed that for a while. German lawyers (especially one) use to sue companies for displaying a link to another site.
... ;-)
And now I read the German government blocks a whole ISP because it didn't like just one page hosted there.
And now a company sues a search engine, because there are links (and a cache) to some information they don't like.
Where do they all think they are????
I'm going to move right away to Germany and I'll sue all companies displaying: "This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer". I bet I'm gonna make a bunch of Euros like this
We surrender!
1. The concerned Radikal publication is from 1996/1997; Its banning/blackage in The Netherlands was unsuccessful then. Why a lawsuit now? Is it because Deutsche Bahn is (again) planning to transport nuclear waste material soon?
2. The Dutch court has made a 'tussenvonnis' (mid-sentence?). XS4ALL has said to await the final judgement.
.bbr
fear women playing with delete functions ...
next time it could be you .
I can understand that DB would want xs4all.com to remove the pages because they tell how to damage DB property. Now, whether xs4all.com should have had to remove the pages seems a bit iffy to me, but let us assume for the sake of argument that there is certain information that should not be posted to the web.
I can then understnad the desire to have google (or anybody else who has caches of web pages) remove the cache from the web, since if the content shouldn't be available (again, iffy), then google shouldn't provide it either.
However, they want google (and yahoo) to remove links to the site. It seems dubious to me that you should be able to force someone to remove a link to somebody elses site. If they didn't want google linking to their own site, it wouldn't bother me. However, I can't condone demanding that a third party remove lniks to something I just don't like.
What if Amazon.com demanded that google remove all links to Barnesandnoble.com...
They didn't because Google allows you to have your pages removed, not somebody else's pages, like Deutsche Bahn asked.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
This doesn't necessarily mean that Germany is a less free country, though: The German constitution ("Grundgesetz") balances a lot of individual rights against each other.
Particularily for the freedom of speech this means that something can be covered by the freedom of speech, but must stand back behind more important values. Regulations of speech must be general enough (to not single out specific people or groups) and must be deemed necessary to defend such another important right.
Having said all that, everybody and their dog knows that the magazine in question is prosecuted for their political work ("leftist"), not for some obscure technical documentation. Deutsche Bahn as a former public service and now state-owned company is deeply rooted in the political system.
Should be 'access ist verboten'
Gregor
As someone who works for a major German telecommunications company, I was directly involved in this, in that my office was responsible for giving the DB a 'heads up' about the site (whether or not we found it I'm not sure).
I was asked to take a look at the portion of the site relating to my companies products (which was a guide on how to sabotage them to disrupt train services), and essentially the most elegant intructions given were "Pry the cover off, bash the insides to pieces with a rock, and/or fill it up with dirt/glue/etc".
This was only a few weeks ago too, and this is the first I've heard of any action the DB has taken, but I am quite impressed at the speed at which this has progressed.
(Details have been left vague to give me some semblance of anonyminity, protect my job, etc)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
From indymedia:
So far, the verdict is "intermediate"; no motivation has been given yet.
Does anyone know if that means that the verdict can change?
Also, DB promised to involve the Dutch police. This could mean two lawsuits: one between DB and XS4ALL, and one between the Dutch DoJ and XS4ALL.
From the article:
Not true. IANAL, but there are types of speech that are not protected, for example, yelling fire in a crowded theater. However, the U.S. courts would most likely have a more strict set of rules for defining non-protected speech.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, us Americans and our stupid obsession with free speech. I've heard it all before from these Euro-wimps.
--
For the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."
Seems to me... this is what Freenet is for.
Just toss the document into Freenet and publish
its key on the website.
How does that mean it's less free? I can't have this information (not completely a deal-breaker; there's information I'm not allowed to have in the US.) But the information isn't copyrighted. Also, I can't go and convert people to Scientology (as I recall), and, unlike in the US, I don't have to defend my speech against regulations, the regulators have to defend their regulations against the inherent freedom of my speech.
I'm a big fan of the First Amendment, and 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. It makes me grateful that I live where I live, despite its many problems. (And I'm not a rabid USA-USA-USA sort, either.)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
what Germany does have is a law which forbids the creation of any laws which demean humans, which the US does not have. This is interpreted to include things such as the death penalty (which most of the civilized world considers abhorrent anyway)
I can't believe it's not lard!
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.
Translation from: http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/germ/ggeng.h
Why the freespeech in germany isn't as free as in the USA is because of the second part. Most of the restrictions of the free speech are because the content of the speech is against the constiution.
Jan
That the average Joe on the street doesn't want to cut power to a domestic railway system, but that your average nutcase or terrorist might.
What would you say to a site that said
"10 easy ways to Hijack and airliner and slam it into a building" ?
And if you say it isn't the same imagine a train carrying nuclear waste being damaged or destroyed. It is censorship but surely this is also an incitement to a criminal act which is a police matter anyway.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The "not legal" part is in other codes of law that describes restrictions of rights which have been found to be desirable.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
If the sites go away, reply to this comment with the news, and I can honor reasonable requests for copies of the english translated mirror.
This *MAY* require PGP (GPG) key exchange, so make sure you have yours ready!
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
We need a GOOGLE TOPIC .
Schnapple
Isn't it ironic now that the U.S. is starting to enforce it's laws outside its borders (Dimitry Skylarov, anyone?) that other countries expect to do the same? Did we really expect an international medium (the Internet) to comply with the laws of just one country?
What is needed is for all of the countries which use the Internet to agree on a set of standards/rules which govern the Internet, and a way for those who want to post material which violates those rules to restrict their sites to countries where such material is legal. Currently, the web knows no borders and has no means of keeping information from traversing state and national boundaries into areas where it may be illegal (China excepted...) While this might seem draconian, it could easily keep citizens of other countries from being prosecuted should they choose to visit countries in which their viewpoints are illegal (such as the U.S. and China), since such illegal content would not be available to the prosecutors in the offended country.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Christian Schreyer, head of the legal department for media and competition law at Deutsche Bahn in Berlin said, "We always have trouble with people sabotaging our system and people were following these instructions."
Shouldn't he also be talking about how the train system is being fixed as fast as humanly possible?
Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Most important is the fact that they explicitly say that they decided to sue in Germany because they ALREADY know that they do not stand a chance in a U.S. Court. Therefore they will go to whichever court (in this case, German) that will give them the ruling they want. Talk about boutique justice.
http://web.archive.org/web/19981206125714/www.xs4a ll.nl/~tank/radikal/
or simply go to www.archive.org and type in http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal
dinner: it's what's for beer
Yet another attempt to whitewash online reality by eliminating not only websites but also their very mention (especialloy in search engines). Somewhat reminiscent of Scientology's heavy-handed attempts at search engine censorship employing the DMCA?
From the Infoworld article: "Even if the pages no longer exist on XS4ALL sites, we want the search engines to remove the link because it still advertises a handbook for destruction. People will start looking for it elsewhere and we don't want that."
If you do a search for Deutsche Bahn on Google, the first two links are now to this news story. Precisely the opposite effect?
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
I think that information like this can be potentially destructive. I would never condone someone using one of Hayduke's books, or the Anarchist's Cookbook, for harming another person; nor do I believe that books such as 'Making Your 30-03 Springfield Fully Automatic' really has any purpose in our civilization.
That being said, information such as this -- for picking locks, field-expedient ordnance, dirty tricks, even making ricin-DNSO -- is important to have. There may very well come a time when it is not only important but *neccessary* to conduct illegal activities for whatever reason. One thing that comes to mind is for a guerilla resistance movement in an occupied country. Information on how to fight the occupying army is at least important as food and ammunition to such groups. Yes, this information can be potentially devastating, but there exists the potential, real need for it.
Now, obviously, this information can be abused. I'm sure there are real-life anarchists out there who would jump at the chance to "stick it to the Man" and in the process kill a lot of people. There's no easy way to address this. There are two conflicting needs here, and unfortunately there's no way to be equitable about it: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. How do you decide what information is kept free?
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I find all this kind of thing intriguing. The internet is the vehicle of the esoteric. I think that it is very easy to run a powerful argument that the activities performed in a given jurisdiction are subject to the laws of that jurisdiction (most I hope would agree). However what about a communications service provider? If a one of their customers is shown to be doing something illegal within the customers jurisdiction then (given that it is serious enough) I think that one could argue that their connectivity should be removed. But the comms provider has no duty of care as to what packets are sent over its network (or who retrieves those packets). In legal terms, they are too remote, despite their actual proximity. For example the taxi driver that takes an armed robber to the bank. They are not an accomplice, but were they to become aware, they then get a duty of care that affects their continuing supply of the service.
:-) not in Europe (and especially not France or Germany) where the censoring these ideas is much more widely accepted.
The international nature of the internet is an important factor here, but jurisdiction shopping is an old issue. It is not novel. If you want to set up a site the promotes hostility towards people or things, host it in th US where your free speech is more robustly protected (interesting as to whether it is consitutionally protect given that one might not be a citizen
All the technical issues about the difficulty of actually detecting such illegality is relevant but only in an executive sense, ie the executive arm of government has to balance the difficulty of enforcement against the cost of over vigorous restraint from the legislative branch.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
"Deutsche Bahn recently sent letters to all three U.S. search engine operators asking them to remove the hyperlinks to the online copies of two articles from the German-language left-wing extremist publication, Radikal, which has been outlawed in Germany."
Outlawed? I had no idea that an entire publication could be made illegal in that country. But then it is not too suprising considering the fact that they outlaw anything and everything to do with the Nazi era just like France does. Nevermind the fact that armbands with swastika's on them can't hurt anyone. I'm of the strong opinion that reminders of the Nazi era should be kept around and carefully studied so that the next time a similar group, such as Scientology, comes around the people will know it for what it is.
If you live in the US, be glad. Our country may not be perfect, but at least here attempts to silence political views have to be done quietly and covertly rather than through direct and obvious government action.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Learn to Shoot Quicker or get out of my way :)
PS I realize we're talking about a private company, in a country without all of the free speech protections of the US.
Sounds pretty clear from this slashdotter's comments that Germany does have much the same free speech protections as the US, at least in terms of their Constitution.
My journal has hot
There's no accounting for taste, anyway.
The obvious point is, if it's shown on German TV and Germans apparently like to watch it, it doesn't seem to be too insulting to Germans, now does it? (So much for your attempt at political correctness.)
You want to see something *really* politically incorrect about WWII? Try the British comedy "Allo Allo"...you know, the series with the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klump", a gay German tank commander, a Prussian general whose idea of politics is to shoot French peasants and so on. (And again, my wife loves it, as do I.)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Ah, the beautiful irony! The DB guy says 'There's no chance to sue them in the US, you can put anything online there'. Of course, he's half right: you probably are allowed to put instructions for how to sabotage a train system on a website (whether you think that's a good thing or not is another matter). But boy-oh-boy, if you put something online that might affect the tiniest bit the record or movie industry's revenue, you'll be sued to hell.
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.
Of course they're sueing where their chances are best (At least they're a German company and it's about a page in German so Germany was more or less an obvious choice; it'd get a little surreal if they'd done it in China or something like that)
But it's sad to see how legislation of your own country becomes worthless as someone who wants to sue you will always find an excuse to do it in some country which suits him better.
You can't any longer rely on the fact that you have not broken local laws and, if you are unlucky, your next trip abroad could get really nasty (Sklyarov anyone?)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
This is not a flame, just an observation.
It's pretty interesting to see how many people will jump up and down and scream bloody murder when someone attempts to censor a left-wing website, but those same people are strangely silent when it comes to attempts to censor conservative or right-wing sites, college newspapers, or books.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Having said that - if you're so concerned about safe passage, look in to the issue. Maybe you're not as safe as you think you are.
Freedom of speech is not absolute in America, and never has been. Nor should it be.
Darned close, yes, but there have always been some things you couldn't do. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is the classic example. Distributing child pornography is still quite illegal. Telling somebody to go kill other people or destroy property is likewise outlawed. And of course, there have always been restrictions against libel and slander.
That's the way it's always been. Freedom of speech was never absolute, nor was it intended to cover such acts. Deconstructionist interpretations of the First Ammendment can't change that.
Whether the limitations apply to this case might be open to debate. Personally, I'm content to let the parties settle it themselves.
Google is pretty much immune under U.S. law for someone else's speech that they're caching. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects them from civil liability.
The Infoworld article states:
> "There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are
> really allowed to put anything on the Internet
> there," Schreyer said.
I bet you can't download the instructions in mp3 format!
If you're feeling in the mood, e-mail DB indicating that the Internet has eliminated the ability to suppress speech, and provide links to said sites, pointing out that people will create more and more instances of these sites (on servers hosted by various countries) until the lawsuit is withdrawn.
Make sure you indicate quite clearly that you are in complete agreement that acts of sabotage are inappropriate, illegal and reprehensible (even if you sympathise with the environmentalist cause, this isn't relevant here), but that this has nothing to do with terrorism, and everything to do with freedom of information.
- http://www.ecn.org/radikal/
- http://www.connix.com/~harry/radikal/
- http://www.df.lth.se/~micke/not_my_political_view
s / adikal/ - http://catalog.com/jamesd/radikal/
- http://rigel.cyberpass.net/radikal/
- http://radikal.autono.net/
There were originally over 58 mirrors, but it seems most of them have chickened out.I wonder if there will even be a time when people will be able to discuss developments in germany without reference to the nazis. this is 2002 after all, or is my watch wrong?
That of course surmises I get to speak my mind before getting shot at.
78% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
pulease, did you even watch SNL, mr.walken pretty much filled the census out like everyone else
the only fact is that everything is an opinion
go to the german amazon, cut-and-paste "The Anarchist Cookbook" into the the search field on the top, it even has free shipping...
btw, you should be aware that sabotage of railroad tracks is not uncommon in germany to fight transports of nuclear waste.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
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.
I just heard something like that last week...James Q. Wilson (social scientist, moralist, darling of the conservatives) was speaking at my school, and tossed off some comment about how "conservatives may have committed many evils, but they've never censored speech on a college campus. Liberals are the ones who do that."
But after hearing that and now your related comment, I still don't think it's true. For one thing, I have yet to see good examples (this happens a lot; e.g., Wilson was also fond of saying that all the students in his classes, when asked whether they'd condemn the Holocaust, had a knee-jerk "well, we have to view it from the Nazi's point of view before we judge" reaction...I live in academia and I've never met anyone who would honestly and seriously say that). In fact, the only examples I have are myself and my friends - against censorship of anything, for any reason, regardless of what "wing" of politics is getting shafted by the censorship, and I think most people who are going to "jump up and down and scream bloody murder" would feel the same way...
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.
Non-governmental supported organized warfare(warfare, violence, tomato, tomahto) is conducted by guerillas. Terrorists specifically target civilian, non-military targets to inspire fear in order to further a political agenda. Setting up in lines on a battlefield across from the military of the government is NOT a terrorist act.
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...
That there is no spoon.
- Matrix
perhaps you should read the infoworld article. what a lame troll.
Poof.
This is a dirty trick, what the German government's doing. Basically, it amounts to, "you can't win the case in the country where Google is based, so you try to win it through a German subsidary". In other words, they're side-stepping the US' 1st Amendments by suing the German subsidary. Thus, if they win in court in Germany, Google may be forced to take down its links to that website in the US too -- because if they didn't, any accounts they have in Germany could be impounded and their offices in Germany could be shut down.
I heard someone say, "when will we be able to talk about what the Germans do without also mentioning the Nazi's". Well, I'm German (but raised in US). But they still haven't cleared from their nazi and communist past.
Burned books, banned books, what's the difference? In Germany, "Mein Kampf" is a banned book. So are any other extremist books.
Who decides what is "bad" and "good"? By banning books, the German government is effectively burning them today.
I've never read Fahrenheit 451, but I did see the movie. One of my favorite lines was when the Captain says, "We must burn the books, Montag," and then, holding up a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf, continues, "All of the books."
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
If you can express your opinion freely, but not say things that are against the constitution, does that mean that you can't have an opinion that the constitution is bad? Such an opinion is theoretically impossible or something?
I guess they all switched from politics to the railroad.
"There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there," Schreyer said.
This is from the country that prides itself in producing- and hosting on the internet- videos of people shitting on each other?
I think they're the ones with problems about what their citizenry puts on the internet. Sure, shit videos are protected speech here, but 99% of our porn is just licking, sucking, and fucking.
Maybe thats what happens when you repress free speech like Germany does, cause it might hurt someone's feelings- you get shit videos.
Blah, give me railroad destruction instructions any day.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
And the same law has already chilled speech by making several people restrict access to various documents to people outside the US (including Alan Cox for a few Linux kernel changelog entries)?
So much for free speech guarantees in the US.
Yes, there are areas where you have more free speech rights in the US than in Germany, but the opposite is also true.
> but there have always been some things you couldn't do. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is the classic example.
n dness.com/FREEDOM990628.htm
That is a fallacious argument. You might want to read this to see why.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:www.fatalbli
xs4all has also taken heat for hosting some anti-scientology pages.
There's some interesting stuff about when they got raided by the CoS (church of scientology) here.
Excerpt: A corporation like CoS, having its' own security service with a capacity equal to that of a small country, would scare the shit out of any normal firm. XS4ALL, however, is NOT a normal middle-sized firm. It is an ex-foundation, an offshoot of the Dutch hacker-magazine "HackTic". The staff at XS4ALL are ALL cyberpunks, former long-haired anarchists happy to find themselves in charge of a company so fast growing, that it is considered important for the Dutch national economy. And as you can tell from its' name, this is a company which wants to give everyone access to information, worldwide.
__
Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
wget'ing the whole thing now from another source and piped through babelfish so us english readers can know how to disable german railroads.. http://204.251.2.39/radikal/ should be done a little later.. as for the free speech thing.. well, out on the west coast I read about a protest that said "Hate speech is not free speech" and I thought about how stupid people were with the "IS NOT" portion of that and thought if you limit it in any way, then it is no longer free speech so they are shooting themselves in the foot, the same people who print hate magazines against logging companies complaining about maxim magazine.. *sigh* I am actually sick of this argument.. -joeldg
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
One - if someone can ban something, it should only be for residents in and citizens in their country. E.g. Germany bans Deutsche Bahn related post - then servers located in Germany, and those in the .de domain, and those with .eu or .org or .edu or .com registered as being in Germany should be the only ones affected.
Two - One is not currently practical. Therefore we must resist the attempt to ban access for those of us in the Rest Of The World, the Majority, from the actions of the Minority (Germany).
All the rest is legal fluff.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
...who sit around saying to themselves, "I think I'd like to terrorize Germany today, if only I could think of a good way to really get 'em. I know, perhaps I can find a German website which could give me some ideas." It will also stop all the normally sane people who one day surfing, happen across this site and think, "You know, that might be kind of fun."
We'd better get google sued before this gets mirrored in the US, because once it gets on a U.S. website, they're screwed. I hope it doesn't make it to Slashdot, 'cause then they'd be really screwed. Of course terrorists would never look on a U.S. website for information about how to commit terrorism in Germany, so I guess they might be safe if they can shutdown all the German sites. Good thing we've got the clear thinking quick witted people on our side. For a second there, I thought we might someday have another terrorist attack.
Isn't Deutsche Bahn infringing on that patent that Anonymous Coward got registered for the business method of using lawsuits as a means to get content massively duplicated and spread all over the internet very rapidly?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This has got to be the funniest thing I have ever seen in Infoworld. Short of an advertisement during the Super Bowl, I can't think of anything else they could do that would be more likely to make people want to look for it elsewhere. Have they learned nothing from the idiocy of the Scientology copyright wars?
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
We don't need Freedom of Speech protections to protect Aunt Helen's "I love puppies!" website.
Apparently we do! I've searched and searched and for the life of me I can't find any reference to Aunt Helen's "I love puppies!" website. Curse those censors! They've already gotten to Google on this one!
First Dimitri, now this. Enough is enough! It's time we took a stand against this corporate anti-puppy campaign! Who's willing to register http://www.boycottpetsmart.com?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Bad design? How do you design a railway that is immune to sabotage?! Have you ever seen a railway before?
It's worth noting that DB runs ICE (InterCity Express) locomotives/rolling stock that reaches speeds in excess of 300 km/h. At that speed, derailing the train could not only kill hundereds of passengers, but also do seriously damage anything the trains hits as well.
Derailing trucks carrying radioactive material, which is, I believe, the aim of these documents (I haven't read them, though I can read German) and this is quite dangerous. Although the said rolling stock is designed to withstand collisions, it's stupid to take risks like that for no reason. And the people doing this call themselves environmentalists. Presumably, derailing a train would be a big propaganda victory for them (Look! Evil RADIOACTIVE TOXIC DANGEROUS-TO-CHILDREN stuff is crashing! Stop it now! Before it's too late!) It wouldn't solve any ecological purpose. Of course, who would have thought Greenpeace would do something just for the PR...
That being said, I still don't think the site should be taken down, unless it is actively inciting people to destroy or mutilate tracks.
Horse shit. The Constitution was written by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and ratified in 1788. The Bill of Rights was proposed in Congress in 1789 and ratified in 1791. Two minutes spent reviewing the National Archives website would have shown you this.
the order in which they appear was almost as contentious a subject of debate as what they actually say. It is no coincidence that they appear in the order they do.
More rubbish. There were originally 17 amendments proposed in Congress by James Madison. Five of these were dropped or amalgamated in the Congress. Twelve of them were sent to the states for ratification. The first two were not ratified; if they had been, then today's First Amendment would actually be the Third. And the most important Amendments, at least to those discussing the issue at the time they were proposed, were the current Ninth and Tenth amendments (originally the Elevenbth and Twelfth) -- yet they were placed last.
There is no historical justification for supposing that the First Amendment, or for that matter the Second, is of any more importance or inviolability than the others, simply because of the order in which it appears in the Bill. I defy you to produce any support for your opinions.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
It happened over 22.3 years ago, therefore it can be declared funny.
Don't you know about the 22.3 year rule?
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.
In Germany, there are laws against free expression, banning hate speech, Nazi-talk, and so forth. An outcome of a certain war, I believe. That said, it is clear the above clauses permit arbitrary reduction of free speech, and allow for too much government control.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
simply, economically, frequently repeatable
In front: The trackage of the course is gespickt with Apperaturen, which are to guarantee safe and as smooth a flow of traffic as possible. Our attention applied to such systems, whose do not endanger sabotage the security of humans, but nevertheless as much as possible friction in the flow of traffic to cause - and we would have something found!
To better understanding small few course customer:
In the railway company the track distances are divided into individual successive distance paragraph, which are monitored and secured. Only in each case one course may be in a paragraph!
The security managed over signals and the monitoring runs over electronic signalling equipment (sensors).
FIG. 1 (comes still..... sometime)
If a course a yellow occurs pilot signal showing, Zugfuehrer/die course guide must initiate a braking to come the before the red hauptsignal showing to a halt.
The basic position of the signals is green . Only if the paragraph concerned is filled, the signal red shows.
FIG. 2.3 (comes still... sometime)
In view of the risk, which a pannekoepfiges, thoughtless Herumfummeln at course-technical mechanisms catastrophic consequences can have, we guess/advise dringendst: Devices, whose regulation/function does not admit exactly is, are taboo!
In addition e.g. the INDUSO for us (inductive strain-relief counts; Fig. 4), which with security with the search for axle counters will discover you. They are to be differentiated optically easily from these; obvious features are i.e. an even, rectangular surface and its positioning at the track, at the exterior of the rail with some cm " air " between rail and device.
FIG. 4 (comes still... sometime)
So, with this little basic knowledge can make you for it on the search for " your " axle counter. Ideal discovery sites are the environment of signals on free distance. With bored view from the compartment window during a course travel now and then signs are noticeable, which you know similarly from motorway departures: Barks, with 1,2 and 3 diagonal beam. They indicate the distance to the pilot signal.
Thus you (probably) the at the beginning of a distance paragraph sighted. Pays attention to the oberleitungsmasten; they have continuously sequential numbering, facilitate the later finding of the place.
A stepping out of the course, the way back and crawling by the unterholz we leave blank times and assume, it are with dornenzerkratzten hands and tannennadeln in the hair at the clearing race in the proximity of " your " place. Take something time to you, a good workstation and provides there a feeling for the environment and the traffic conditions looks you up - whereby it is helpful to have clock and timetable. Then the search begins. With the bored view from the window, mentioned above, it must have noticed to you additionally that at the edge of the railway track " boxes " (fig. 5) are with yellow bases (in the GDR often still grey) - so also, where you are now. They mostly sit on short tubing stubs rising up out of the earth.
FIG. 5 (comes still... sometime)
Checks, what in the height such box at the track is. As orientation a quite thick line (sturdy tank hose serves; see fig. 2+5), which leads from the box to the track. It flows into a device, which is installed to the rail directly. (that like that, continues your investigation is not with the next box - there several must be.)
Regard to you the device exactly (however long braking distances have caution when do gymnasticsdoing gymnastics doing gymnastics on the tracks, courses!)
The two types of oh counting devices, which we present here, are quite easy to identify. They see - draufgeguckt from above - from like trapezoidal steel blocks and are
- as unique piece at the inside (fig. 3), or
- as doubles at the interior and exterior the same rail (fig.
2)
fastened.Thus are you at the target of your search!
Now again turns you to the box, because around it it goes.
Which employs it with contents of the respective box, is left to your fantasy, the pallet is enough from cable by pinching (natural with isolated tools) to total loss.
Still a few thoughts in the end: If the whole is to go beyond a purely symbolic ATS, are both the point in time and the range of the putting out of operation of importance. If it concerns a completely determined course, which is important to you, the point in time should be selected in such a way that the course cannot be rerouted beforehand on another distance.
To be rerouted it knows also always on the Gegengleis to umfahren the the problem zone - thus: both directions sabotage.
Additionally applies; massive the failures on a distance, ever, are, the lamely creep the course its target against.
And us sometime times to ears that the marketing department of the railways puzzles about the cause of a rapidly rising demand for Bahncards, those should come to observe is in the apron of recruit collection dates, pushing away feed with deserters from ex Yugoslavia and refugees at all, peace goods feed, Castor transports and other ekliges more - if occurs, then we make happy enormous and drink ourselves one on it (at least).
Treble damage is triple damage, or three times Google's damages.
Pope Felix the Scurrilous.
Computer Geek by day, religious Icon by night.
So it would be Ok if they changed the page to something like, "In my opinion, it would damage the railway badly if someone were to..."? Violating the spirit of the law but sticking to the letter you say? Well, that's Ok because the German Constitution obviously violates the spirit of free speech whilst maintaining a resemblance to the letter of it.
Let me spell it out to you: the spirit of free speech is that the government is not permitted to regulate the flow of information. Controlling all information is tyranny just as surely as a Gestapo or some other secret police. It is a far more insidious tyranny, in fact, because it is a hidden tyranny, where the prisoners can injure themselves on the bars because they are not permitted to see them.
If the government is permitted to regulate the flow of factual information that it does not like, then it will not permit people to inform others about government graft and corruption, etc.
If you want to discuss pedophiles, remember that pedos are a much smaller problem than a government tyranny (in terms of the number of people it effects). Tyranny control has to be done first, then the pedophiles can be dealt with (laws such as victimizing children, aiding and abetting, etc.).
BlackGriffen
Just to clarify: the Deutsche Bahn hasn't won in the case against xs4all yet. A preliminary verdict was issued that forced xs4all to close down the website in question for the time being, but the final ruling won't be available until april 25th. Given that the material is NOT copyrighted by Deutsche Bahn, and is NOT illegal in the Netherlands, I would expect the preliminary verdict to be overturned in favor of xs4all.
Hi,
...
today I had a phone talk with Christian Schreyer, the legal advisor of Deutsche Bahn.
Deutsche Bahn will sue all, who create a mirror of this pages; if it's not possible sue them (e.g. free speech laws in the US or whatelse), they want to block the pages at the german access providers: There is a filter system in development, which will be able to block all unwanted URLs.
The stalking-horse to establish these filter system (called "Filterpilot"), which uses a combination of routing and transparent proxying, are nazi websites. Denying holocaust is illegal in germany and there is a wide front against nazis; they use this to establish filterpilot at all border gateways.
The district government of Düsseldorf, which is the outrider in the case of net censorship in germany, sais: "If we want to prohibit milk drinking, we have first test this with two milk bottles."
It is naive to think, that "Filterpilot" will remain in Germany. It's a commercial development and not only in germany there are lot if interested organisations in such a filter: remember MPAA, IPFI, Scientology,
At ODEM we have a petition against provider side filter systems. Please support us and sign the Declaration for freedom of information in the internet.
ODEM.org Tour (about censorship)
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 a deeply flawed, naive response. First, France was occupied by a hostile power. This is a German group 'resisting' a democratically elected German government. They are not disenfranchised or repressed, but rather lazy and/or malicious. The could affect changes in German nuclear energy policy through political means, but choose not to. Second, French freedom fighters did not intentionally target and endanger German civilians. They sabotaged military targets. This group recklessly endangers civilian targets, which is disgusting.
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.
Another bold claim with nothing to back it up. Please explain to me in a moderately logical way how the American revolution relates to the current 'war on terror' and this anti-nuclear group.
The US's current military action against these militant Islamic groups began when we were attacked. Al Queda hates the US - their main goal is the killing of 'infidels'. They attacked 2 African embassies, the USS Cole, and the WTC. On the other hand, the American revolution's goals were stated in the Declaration of Independence which was sent to the British monarchy. We reached our goals through military conflict, not by attacking non-combatants. The comparison between the rebelling colonies and the German group is even worse. The colonies fought because they did not recieve Parlimentary representation - the German group has that at it's fingertips.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
I think there's another cliché that is applicable here and it is "The right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins." Here's another example where there's no implied contract. Imagine I run out onto the street holding a syringe full of poison and say to someone "The city has just been sprayed with Anthrax, here inject yourself with this antidote!" the person does and promptly dies. Would it be acceptable to claim that I had just been exercising my right to free speech? After all I can say whatever I want and no speech should be made illegal. Obviously in this case my speech has resulted in actions that have severely harmed others and as such it should be illegal.
I personally think that there are many laws that construe what should be restricted in an overbroad way in many countries but I do believe that a strong case can be made for disallowing certain expressions that will cause severe harm to others.
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...
As I understand it the the censored article was a descrition of a rather sophisticated form of sabotage. They trigger the railway system's built in fail-safe mechanisms and the trains slow to a few MPH. Minimal damage that actually results in safer than normal operation.
You can disagree with their position. You can arrest them when they sabotage equipment. But you have to respect their commitment to safety.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Wait, I'm sorry, we're talking about an article that describes sabotaging a train station?
You're kidding me, right? They think that taking that off the search engines is going to stop people from breaking down trains? Hell, I haven't even read it yet, and i've immediately got about 5 ideas. Why not lace some plastic explosives on the track? Dump some concerete into the subway tracks... How hard is it to break down a train, for godsakes?
Everybody should be aware of how disastrous attacks on modern railways can be: on the 3rd of July 1998 a high speed train of DB derailed at 200 KM/H because of a technical defect, killing 101 people and wounding 108. This is comparable to an aircraft crash. Considering that nowadays speeds of 200 to 300 KM/H aren't uncommon, I bet some Al Quaida nut head is already studying the possibility of a terrorist attack on such a train.
Do you have any understanding for people telling how to replicate 9/11? I don't.
Yeah, just like they learned to wear headdresses from old Tarzan movies.
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.
Here's a much more useful archive of the site than Google's:
/ /w ww.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/
n l/ ~tank/radikal/
/zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
http://web.archive.org/web/20020208065004/http:
The Internet Archive also has past versions:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.xs4all.
The main page for the Internet Archive's multi-year web collection is web.archive.org
--Pat
This is a 'case in point' for the freenet project.
This case boils down to 1 thing:
'Someone' said something that 'someone else' takes offense at, and that 'someone else' is going to oppress the freedom of speech of 'someone', at any expense.
When Freenet fulfills its promise, this stuff won't even be possible, so the "someone else" will just have to suck it up.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
The investment continues, with automatic announcements carefully graded according to how late each train is, for example "I am" "sorry for the" "delay" becomes "I am" "deeply" "sorry for the" "severe" "delay" depending on how long the expected delay is! The system effortlessly handles times like 23 hours 38 minutes (I wonder if that was a date miscalculation ;-)
Lesser advanced societies like Germany make do with merely printing timetables on posters, and letting the trains run according to those - where is the suspense? The drama? In Italy they have even been known to paint the timetables onto the walls. How can you start a conversation if even simple things like the trains keep to some artificial timetable?
May I point out that it was a US law (the DMCA) that was used by Scientology recently to get pages pulled out of Googles index?
In that case the "Church" held a copyright on the work in question. I don't think DB has a copyright on railroad destruction materials....
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.
i will have my mirror of it up within a week i should have an english translation at one point in time, our american forefathers trew tea into the harbor as an act of protest...that too was illegal and no it has already been requested that i do not host this on my main site.
My German is not that good, googles German is better, but not good enough. From what I can tell the XS4ALL contained documents on how to gain access to something on rails, perhaps a train, for the purpose of ??derailing?? it? Well.. did anyone else read these documents and figure out what XS4ALL was *really* trying to promote... From what I can tell also XS4ALL is also aligned with some euro-leftists. Euro-leftists like to smoke weed. People who smoke week have to buy it from someone. Someone supports terrorism. So this just isnt good. I'm going to write Dub'ya have these weed-smoking-train-derailing-uberites blown to hell.
Might as well sue the wayback machine too while you're at it.
You are only popular on the Internet.
Nothing must (or should) be absolute. Not even in the US where freedom of speech is used to protect kiddie porn, is it absolute. Amazingly some people are able to function in a system which does not privilege merely one freedom at the expense of others.
Note: I am not saying that freedom of speech is not invaluable and must be protected, just there's other freedoms that need protecting too.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
This isn't a question of proving that the information on the site has a "legal" use. This is about the right to think and speak whatever you want, as long as that act of speech, in and of itself, does not hurt anyone else. Yes there are caveats for defamation, etc. But the point is that thought is difficult without speech, and if I want to fantasize, or discuss, the best way to blow up a railroad, then I -- as an autonomous person -- should have the right to do so. It's about privacy, about getting the thought police and speech police out of our lives, and letting people express themeselves.
A better way to fight crime is to, god forbid, do good police work, while also tackling whatever underlying issues may contribute. But forbidding people from talking about crime is not a legitimate way of fighting it. Banning racial epithets does not decrease racism. Actually bringing these things out in the open, and allowing people to discuss what is on their minds is a much more effective way of fighting crime, while also preserving our freedom to voice unpopular opinions.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
if the constitution is a bad one, isn't the correct response to say "the constitution failed to protect the freespeech, there are too many limitation of art. 5, therefore the constitution is a bad one - so we should get a bunch of guns, overthrow the government, and institute a better one?"
now actually doing that i can see being illegal. but saying that you should do it? seems that if you can't say that, then you're being censored clear as day in direct contradiction to the 'no censorship' clause.
And from here (the very first return from the search "French maquis terror"): In my wartime youth a member of French Maquis who threw a bomb into a café killing a few German officers and a number of innocent drinkers was a hero of the resistance.
Both comments support my contention, if not exactly your straw man 'suicide bombers' contention.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
someone threw fireworks into the cinema (which went off! They (later) canceled the showing). But no-one shouted "Fire!"; the closest people just ran silently. Is it because that is always being used as an example of a thing not to do? So even when it is legitimate to say it, and warn other people, no-one does it? :-/