Germany Legislates For Mandatory Web Filters

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's Minister for Families has announced a legislative initiative to force ISPs to implement a government-mandated block list (in English), which will be updated daily. The BKA (Germany's equivalent of the FBI) will be in charge of generating and maintaining the list. As usual, this is being brought in under the 'fight child porn' guise. The minister is quoted as saying: 'We must not water down the problem' in reply to being challenged that this law and technology could be used to censor other content. She then went on to say: 'I can't know what wishes and plans future governments will develop.' She has agreed the principle of the legislation with the interior minister and the technology minister, which in German coalition government terms means it's pretty much a done deal."

Comments

Re:The world had its taste of freedom...

[LWATCDR]

You depend on checks in other countries. Odds are very high that any political speech that is blocked will not be blocked in another country. People on other countries will see that it is blocked and post it on news sites. If you start seeing news sites being blocked then will know that your government are censoring political sites.
So yes you really can as long as you don't classify blocking kiddie porn as destroying freedom of speech.
Frankly Germany already blocks political speech that is totally legal in the US.