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."

Comments

Re:STOP (Your IP has just been logged)

[dafdaf]

Which is plain wrong. - As the current law even states that of course the IP will be logged ! (The initial proposition of ~1 week ago didn't include that. They quickly 'fixed' that one. ;-)

Re:Don't worry

[oneirophrenos]

Pro-ana = pro-anorexia

Miserable failure in Finland

[grimJester]

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.

Re:Miserable failure in Finland

[grimJester]

Obviously I screwed up the link :(

massive criticism

[Tom]

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:

• This will do nothing to stop child porn
• It is extremely easy to avoid (it's just a DNS block, use a different DNS and you're good)
• They block site instead of prosecuting them, including sites that are known to be in Germany
• It's just a cheap show in election year
• Sites linking to blocked sites will be blocked as well, which means sites like wikileaks. Since the blocklist is secret, you'll never know when you just put yourself on the list.

Sweden has it

[isecore]

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.