Slashdot Mirror
Germany Institutes Censorship Infrastructure
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography. A secret list of IPs will be created by the BKA, Germany's federal police; any attempted access to addresses on this list is blocked, logged (the draft seems to contradict press reports on this point) and redirected to a government page featuring a large stop sign. The law has not yet passed the assembly, however five of the largest ISPs have already agreed to voluntarily submit to the process even without a law in place. Critics argue that with the censorship infrastructure in place, the barrier for blocking access for various other reasons is very low. The fact that the current block can easily be circumvented may lead to more effective technologies to be used in the future. There are general elections as well as elections in several of the states later this year."
Step 1) Child Porn
2) Other "Offensive" Material (e.g. Nazi Material)
3) ???
4) Welcome to the great firewall
From Article: "They will not have their personal details or IP addressed recorded."
Suuuure they won't.
A similar system already exists in Switzerland. I once got the warning page checking a link in a spam message on my blog... (as in "this can't be what it says it is") I guess I'm on a list now.
So the time has come to Rick Roll the entire population of Germany, but with links to banned IP's?
If every breach is logged a huge percentage of Germans will be found out as perverts.
She made the willows dance
So... i2p2.de is getting a lot of press as an anonymous network in which to proxy your traffic.......
and...
The German BKA is planning to put up actual "STOP SIGNS" on the Internet?
If this does not force the average German to start participating, or at least thinking about way around this, I don't what will. Hopefully, you will see a ridiculously huge level of participation in this new networks and we can see on of these networks operate on something other than developer levels of participation.
There could be a silver lining in this after all...
Whats with all the governments jumping on the censorship bandwagon? I for one do not welcome our new censoring overlords
...everybody vote something else than CDU/CSU or SPD this time. Yes we can! ;)
It will only be used to block sites with child porn
and terrorism sites
and sites with info on building bombs
and "pro-ana" sites
and bestiality sites
and sites critical of the government
and copyright violating sites
and sites with violent images
and sites with malware
and porn sites
and sites with content that is considered to be offensive by some
and ...
ok, maybe you should worry
Assuming the site still exists, here's a site explaining what's wrong with the finnish version of this list. I can't check the link for reasons that should be obvious.
Short list of problems:
- 98+% false positives, including the top 7 or 8 google hits for "gay porn"
- Majority of sites are in the EU or US, yet the sites are still up
- The law only allows non-finnish sites to be on that list, yet a finnish site critical of the list is blocked.
Of course if thousands of web sites in dozens of countries hosted simple proxy engines that worked like a browser-within-a-browser so that anyone anywhere could read wikileaks and the bbc then it'd be very difficult to block them all. Especially if they were otherwise legitimate sites that had a proxy page. We can't rely on the internet-routes-around-censorship adage without ensuring it's so.
You can't censor only certain things. It's all or nothing in the censor game. The freedoms we have on the Internet are too well-established now to be removed. You think the government is the only entity that knows anything about the Internet? HA! They don't really know anything about it.
When you vote in these elections mentioned in the summary, vote for someone who does not support censorship
Of course the problem with most modern "democracies" is that on many issues (including censorship, ridiculous IP laws, increased powers for the police etc) there is no-one to vote for who doesn't support it.
Oh and with all the crap the German government is trying to pull, it sounds like the German police may end up being Gestapo MK II in all but name.
There is massive criticism against this within Germany.
Pretty much everyone who knows anything is against it, this includes both the people who know something about the technical details (i.e. IT people) as well as those who know something about child pornography, and even people who were abused as kids.
The summary of the criticism is:
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
HA! They don't really know anything about it.
That's obvious.
However, it's not funny to have the Internet be taken away by people who access the Internet by reading a hardcopy made by their staff.
Claus
These filters are based on the premise that sexual deviants are also idiots. There was child pornography before the internet there will be child pornography with a filtered internet. All this does is set a precedent for a government to censor what it deems harmful to the greater good.
We have the same in Denmark, except here it is the police and "Red Barnet" (child protection NGO) that maintains the DNS blocklist. I think all ISPs uses it.
We have had one case where a legal local site had porn banners, and was blocked due to having banners for a perfectly legal "lolita porn" site. He was delisted again after a day or 2.
The big problem with this list here in Denmark, is that there is no court involved in determining if the content is legal or not. It is Red Barnet and the police that acts as court.
Since IFPI, the danish equivalnet of RIAA got a court order for ISPs to DNS blacklist thepiratebay.org, many danish users has switched nameservers to use opendns and others, so they are no longer protected or blocked from visiting the child porn sites.
This is the fallout of the music industry crusade. More people watching child porn.
If you can read german, this comment from a satire magazin sums it up very well:
http://titanic-magazin.de/stopp.html
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Sweden already has this policy. It's a blocklist implemented in the DNS structure of Swedish ISP's. Thus it's easily avoided by anyone with even basic computer skills.
Officially it's to block kiddie porn, but there's no public examination of what sites are on the list. Also, it's been demonstrated several times that there's a lot of rather odd choices when it comes to blocking - i.e. a korean site about Bonsai trees is on the list.
There's been quite a lot of controversy surrounding this list, and it's been accused of being the start of a slippery slide towards censorship.
Also, it's essentially useless since it's easily avoided.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Systems (political systems), because they're created by man are inherently corruptible (thanks to that man is not perfect dictum). Which is why in the US for instance the old conservatives used to argue for small government, and the founders tried to limit the federal government.
Quack, quack.
The worst thing about this is, that they want to log all blocked dns requests AND after you get on the list YOU have to prove your innocence (and still german politicians call this a constitutional state)!
also they want to put sites on the list, that have links to a site on the list... recursively this will lead to the whole freakin internet to be on that list within a day and EVERYONE to be subjected to child-pornography-raids! (Kristallnacht, anyone?)
PLUS the brainwashed mob supports the NSDAP 2.0 (a.k.a. CDU/CSU), recent surveys say they'll get around 45% in the upcoming election...)
fucking shitfaced neonazi-politicians! this is the worst law since 1945! I want to emigrate from this totalitarian fascist plutocracy!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
There's finally a good reason to dig up Reagan.
"Mr. Kohler, open this gateway. Mr. Kohler, tear down this firewall!"
http://www.bundestag.de/parlament/funktion/gesetze/Grundgesetz/gg_01.html
Artikel 5: Eine Zensur findet nicht statt. (no censorship)
Artikel 10: Das Briefgeheimnis sowie das Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis sind unverletzlich. (privacy of letters)
http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/005.htm
Article 6 - Right to a fair trial: Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law.
As this mechanism uses DNS you can do the following:
Step 1: Get a hold of all Root Zone Files
Step 2: Do the following:
for every domain in all zonefiles // this is the IP of the "stop page" // this is the blocked domain
make a dns lookup on a german dns server
make a dns lookup on a us dns server
if both resulting ips are identical, continue
if not:
add german ip to your own list
add domain to your own list
Voila! You now have not only all the IPs of the BKA servers (which you can now block), but you also have the list of sites which are to be blocked. Stupid mechanism.
Step 3: ?
Step 4: Profit
"Eine Zensur findet nicht statt".
Translated: "There will not be censorship". All ministers and parliamentarians swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. Although not a German, I never knew that there were two Constitutions here in Germany. One for the populace and the real one for the ruling classes....
I'm currently living in Germany. There is no protest. There is no criticism.
250 people were present at the last "Mahnwache" (sth like a demo), thats pathetic.
99% of the retarded Germans (yes, the Volk) don't care or don't understand or both.
There are however some bloggers that try to gain attention with stupid "protests" like the one above.
(How retarded is that? Put your marker on the map, if you object. That really might change things. "zomg, so many markers, we politicians are doing something wrong.". Any yes, people tend to think "well I have set my marker, I have done everything I can to change the system")
They crap into each others blogs how bad the government is, how everything is going to shit, but they
are not DOING SHIT about it. just lamenting, whining.
Get out there and fight for your rights (no, violence is ultimate ratio, try changing the system first), but nobody
actually tries.
Because you did not read anything around your quotations. It says: ~whatever we allow you to say or read, will be free of censorship~ but in lawyer-speak.
So my question is: Why don't they get those sites closed?
There was an article in c't, the German IT magazine. I'm citing from the online version
Short sumary: The child proteciton organization Carechild did an interesting experiment: They used 20 of the entries from the Danish blocklist. 17 of those URLs were in the US, one each in Netherlands, South Korea, and UK. They contacted the hosters via the abuse-mail adresses and asked them to close down those child porn sites. Eight of the US hosters closed the sites within three hours of contact, 16 of the sites were closed within one day. Three sites were reported (truthfully) by hosters (after checking) to not contain child porn and not against any laws.
My question now is: If Childcare can do it, why not the mighty BKA (FBI of Germany)? I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway...
*sigh* - politicians really drive me crazy...
Wasn't there a project by Cult of the Dead Cow a few years back that should be a p2p browser? So if you are in a country where some site is blocked you can access it via other users from other countries? I remember something like Freebird. Here it says it was called Peekabooty. https://training.hackinthebox.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2027 Maybe something like this could be really useful in the future.
You did not read anything around that sentence. The famous Art 5 says in lawyer-speak: ~whatever we allow you to say or read, will be free of censorship~. It says nothing that they cannot block whatever they don't like.
The government "detected child pornography steganographically concealed in those innocent images".
Actually, I, like you, think they just made a mistake. But since steganography exists, the government can justify blocking any website using the above excuse.
One more reason this is a very, very bad idea.
It appears the Nazi party never left Germany,
P.S
sorry slashdot I just got you added to a future blacklist.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
There is one way to make a blacklist work & prevent it from being abused. Keep it private to where only law enforcement (not politicians) can use it. Make it Wikipedia style to log the time & date of changes made as well as the UID & IP person submitting the changes. Then if the changes made are later found out to be inconsistent with the goal of the blacklist, you *arrest* the submitter & charge them with *felony* unlawful access to a computer system. If they want to be have a police state we can show them that it can work both ways.
There is a war going on for your mind.
"Click Here to get a random whistleblower page. ... Do You Feel Lucky?"
It's Wikileaks merged with Blackjack.
"Biden & hollywood, Bush & Iraq, DAMN - I got rickrolled!"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Germany's government has passed a draft law for censorship of domains hosting content related to child pornography."
I don't know whether the summary was inaccurate, but the phrase "related to child pornography" is extremely disturbing. I run a website which frequently criticises child pornography laws, but doesn't contain child pornography. Will that be censored too?
Even if child pornography is the only material which is blocked, I still don't agree with the filter. Studies have shown that the majority of prohibited material involving children does not depict sexual abuse. It is also ridiculous to claim that simply accessing freely available child pornography encourages the sexual abuse of children (the music industry certainly doesn't take kindly to people downloading their content without paying, so why should child pornographers?). In Germany, possessing a non-photographic "pornographic" depiction of a character who appears to a virtual child can result in a lengthy prison sentence. Will the filter "protect" cartoon children too?
The methods which the authorities used to push this filter are somehwhat suspect. Germany has, for some time, battled to persuade its citizens to accept internet filtering, however there is a fairly large civil rights community and a strong belief in the freedom of the internet, resulting in much opposition to such censorship. Just a week before the vote on the draft legislation to implement filters, German police coincidentally "broke up" a huge "child pornography ring", allegedly involving 9000 people. This was presumably a sting operation which involved the logging of the IP addresses of every visitor to a police-operated website, followed by raids on the properties linked to every IP address which had been logged. It doesn't matter that only 50 or so people will be convicted, because the authorities have already won....
Anyone who now opposes internet filtering will be reminded of the huge "child pornography ring" and accused of supporting the horrific sexual abuse of children for huge child pornography networks. Nobody can check the police's evidence because that would be illegal and a child would be "revictimised", while anyone who wanted to check would obviously be a paedophile. And so the draft legislation passed.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
while i agree with your sentiment - i never knew that "being gay" was a "moral crime" or that their "desires are perverse".
First of all, we have elections this year in Germany and politicians want to be seen as acting persons. So they make populistic decissions. The law is not to pass until after the election. Therefor it might be dropped after election. There is already a good reason for that, because even the minister of justice thinks the law is in violation of the German constitution.
But the real problem is, that the whole method is a hoax. They fix DNS servers so you get rerouted to this stop sign. So the easiest fix for every person who is able to open its network setup, is to change the primary nameserver or just use IPs.
Child pronography (CP) is illegal AFAIK in all countries. So if the BKA determined that there is CP present on a server they could track it and if the server is outside Germany they can get help in these countries. And because of that no such criminal would be so stupid to put CP directly on the Internet. Instead, so the child protection agency, they share it privately.
So this results in an placebo action against CP and so nothing real is done against these criminals.
"I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway..."
If a BKA officer closes a child pornography website, he's just doing his job. Whether he closes a child pornography website, arrests a drug dealer, or identifies fraudsters, he gets paid.
If a politician successfully crusades for a blacklist which filters child pornography, he becomes a hero in the eyes of the public. This furthers his career and he makes more money in the future. He may not have the intellectual or political skills to achieve such a high position in other ways.
Politicians have chosen a filter because it's good for their career. The blacklist doesn't really need to work for it to have significant political value; how many voters are actually going to test it?
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
What about... shared ip hostings???
LOL
http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/cgi-bin/seigbest.pl
That will be the first one on the list. Because it reveals that evil Nazi scientists escaped to South America after WWII, and obtained Hitler's DNA from the Russians, and have been mixing it with cat DNA to create Kitlers, which have been shipped around the world, to lead the "The Litter Box Putsch" in your area.
When your cat goosesteps into your living room in jackboots, you'll know the day has arrived.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
By the time child porn is distributed on the Internet, the worst crime has already occurred: children exploited somewhere, with a camera pointed at them. The police have failed to protect those children. Stopping the Internet distribution protects mainly the police from the fact that they have failed to protect these children. It doesn't catch the exploiters who exploited and photographed the children. In fact it keeps those exploiters out of sight, and harder to catch - but harder for the public to notice the police haven't stopped them.
As usual, a police state prioritizes keeping quiet the evidence of its failures to protect by abusing everyone's rights, over actually catching the criminals and protecting the public.
--
make install -not war
However, it's not funny to have the Internet be taken away by people who access the Internet by reading a hardcopy made by their staff.
They need it that way, you cannot highlight parts on a webpage and place a "?" behind it, then hand it back to your staff and hope they can explain to you all those nonsensical jargon words. Like "webpage".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There have been rumors about the final draft of the contract (which of course is secret) between the ISPs and the BKA: It appears that there will be not just DNS blocking but rather Deep Paket Inspection in combination with IP blocking. One more thing: Here you can find an image of the actual stop sign: http://www.heise.de/bilder/136327/0/1. It truthfully says that the access is not logged by the BKA (Fact is that it will be logged by the ISPs and that data will be shared with the BKA).
The BKA is not the German Federal Police, it is rather more like the German equivalent of the FBI. Of course, since this is Slashdot and most of the posters and readers here are total morons, I doubt that it matters.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
Most child porn services are hosted in Germany. And they're very, very good at not getting caught.
This might give interested people a bit of background.
/. readers are significantly more intelligent (on average) than the general population, so I pose this question:
Does anyone here fear CP more than they fear government censorship?
If so, why?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
This law, if passed in its current form, establishes another first for Germany: The technical specification for (elcetronic) handover of the list and the weekly reporting of "incidents" is to be drafted by the Federal Police (BKA, Bundeskriminalamt) and not by the Bundesnetzagentur (German regulatory body) like all the other specs around Lawful Interception, Data retention and such. Which would also mean that not the Ministry for Economics is in charge, but the Ministry of the Interior
Most slashdot readers think they are more intelligent than the average person. Despite this, most slashdot readers really are more intelligent than the average person.
But whatever will I do without 4chan!?
The summary is wrong in a few points:
1. the BKA will create a list of domain names, not IPs
2. The stop website is hosted by each provider that implements the filter
3. The law requires the providers to give access statistics to the BKA for them to use in investigations (which previously was always denied by all politicians).
There are quite a few problems with this:
1. Since this list is secret, there is no way to check that it only contains child pornography
2. There is no process how to get a website off the list if it is has incorrectly been put on it
3. According to the German attorney general if you access the stop page, you must prove that it was by accident or has been a redirection. This reverses the innocent until proven rule.
Based on what I've seen in previous stories here on /. - I see this going through without a hitch and not causing any problems whatsoever.
psych
To distract you while the black van heads to your house.
So presumed guilty just because you happen t hit a web address? Well, i guess its the next logical step in squelching free speech and knowledge.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As _the_ justification for the said law an increase at the child porn open criminal investigation cases is cited by the Minister. The effect is mostly to attribute to the increased police activity and by far not all the open cases end up in a conviction (or even grounds for suspection are found).
It is discussed in the same article at heise.de
I probably could do withouth 12345,
6 (critics) is kind of important for me, but not really,
7 will be available on darknets anyway,
8 - I go to fight club and have fun there myself,
9 could not care less,
10 - will not happen,
11 will probably not happen either, if only in the DMCA form (do you worry, americans?; and if you do how much??
So where is the line they shall not cross? And is it the same for every citizen?
was supposed to be the answer. And lets not forget about state government, which is a joke today, but that's our fault. The regionless, all-seeing, all-knowing federal government is a mistake we live with today and it's bankrupting our country with a never-ending power struggle which sucks for people like you and me, who work to sustain it.
Quack, quack.