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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.
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
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.
There's finally a good reason to dig up Reagan.
"Mr. Kohler, open this gateway. Mr. Kohler, tear down this firewall!"
Changing the system is largely impossible if you're a normal person.
If you have the appropriate connections to change the system, you won't have a need to do so, because the rules won't apply to you either way.
And if you weren't born in the right environment, getting there may require an immense effort or will be downright impossible.
I have a job - i don't have time for political activism. Slashdot, i can do in short breaks while working. Real political activism would eat up the little spare time i have, and probably would start to eat into my work time, leaving me without a job.
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.
Yes, as you can see i already decided what to do.
Doesn't mean i have to like it.
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.
You're right.
I am also living in Germany, but the problem is that it's really difficult to do anything against these things.
I tried to be politically active, and even joined a party. But since I have a fulltime job, I don't have as much as time for political activism as I would like to and as others have. There are so many going-to-become-professional-politicians in those parties with really enough time (some of them have fulltime jobs, but in civil service or such, where they have enough time for politics), that you don't really get the slightest chance to get to the upper levels of the party.
You have to invest so much time that it's really nearly impossible to have a fulltime job and become a politician, who has the people's interest in his mind first and foremost.
In order to get to the top, you have to become a "Political Man", a Homo Politicus. You have to brown-nose, become a real a**hole to get there... And I decided that the price is not worth paying for changing a system which most people seem to accept as "well, good enough" and about which most people don't even give a shit...
And provided you reach the top, you have either become one of "them" or you can't really change anything because there are so many particular-interests, you have to keep brown-nosing so much, do horse-trading, tit-for-tat, that you really lose contact with the people...
Sorry for the rant, but saying "change the system" is easy, doing so is not. And as you said: Since most of the people don't care as long as they get something to eat and some entertainment (Panem et Circenses), they are happy and they don't want to change the system.
My suggestion? Try changing your "small world environment", i.e. help your friends, neighbours and relatives in circumventing such censorships, help them express their anger and inacceptance of the system and help them start to think...
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.
You have been listening to the wrong propaganda ;)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
So once the last lawyer is stuffed into the Ark B those words become meaningless and censorship is abolished?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"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
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
this must have been your provider. I used to work for an ISP not so long ago. The Federal police is forcing providers to monitor all users and hand out these data (in realtime) to their system. But I am not aware of of any such rgulation you are mentioning.
We did not implement it btw, but most of the large providers do it.
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!
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)!
That's why the law will never survive the Federal Constitutional Court. They will dismiss it.
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?)
First: That would render the list useless. Even if they want to use the list results in court, they have to show evidence. That means they have to publish the DNS entries in question.
Second: You don't call it Kristallnacht, because this is a Nazi term. The correct term would be Reichspogromnacht. However, to compare the distruction of jewish property to this list is way out of line.
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...)
CDU/CSU are conservatives, and they are far from any Nazi party. I don't like this party, I definitely will vote for someone else. But they are not Nazis.
If you block google, the Internet will became useless to most people. Think of all those students, who google their thesis together, they would have to do it all by themselves.
I also live in Germany, and can share your view 100%: nobody is concerned here. I wonder however, if the reason is just because they don't understand the implications. For the regular person, this looks just like "they are doing something to fight child porn, and since child porn is bad and they're fighting it, it must be OK". The only way to change this situation is to get people to understand what's really going on, and that's a big challenge because the issues are not only complex but often highly technical.
Probably, the real problem is that achieving this requires really good communication skills, and this is something we geeks don't excell at. Looking around /., I see that many regular contributors here have an absolutely condenscending attitude towards "average Joes". But when dealing with issues such as this, which are essentially political, it is mostly average Joes who cast the votes, so you'd rather take them seriously and find a way to communicate with them.
Until we understand this and act accordingly, we'll continue to see the decisions we care about being made in the wrong direction by clueless or even ill-intentioned politians.
No you have to add all those ferengi-like business people and of course most of those politicians too.
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
You are right. The best thing to do is to change things in your environment. This includes telling people why certain laws, decissions, etc. are bad.
If enough people think in da specific way, politicans come around, because they want to be elected.
I talked about this DNS blocking attempt with my sister, who is a part time politician in the city council. Before I talked to her, she was not really sure that the DNS block list is a bad thing. However, after the talk she is now against it. So sometimes it is really that the people do not know the facts and the implications. And it is our task to tell them.
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.
What's complicated or technical about this?
They're now installing filters against pages that show child porn (nothing technical here, since you don't have to understand how those "filters" work. Just think they deny you access). These filters can be used to block anything. You, the people, do not have access to the list of sites that is blocked, so you will never know whether it's really just child porn that they're blocking.
Yeah, I know. Not later than here you get "Aww, c'mon, they CAN'T do THAT!"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seems to me that erroneus was being fecetious.
Is there any stipulation in the law about links to sites from individual comments vs. content put up by the site maintainers? Because otherwise, you're right, this will result in the entire Internet being blocked in a day. All it's gonna take is someone putting a link to a banned IP in Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, or Fark comment, and then Google will update its cache of those comments a few seconds later. Bam! Everyone's offline at once.
If this happens, I think it would be excellent. It might finally teach politicians that the law of unintended consequences has not be repealed.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
/. 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
You forgot: We are the descendants of the people on Ark B.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
while i agree with your sentiment - i never knew that "being gay" was a "moral crime" or that their "desires are perverse".
That's because you aren't asking the people that he's talking about.
of course you do not have to like it, but if you pick "not doing anything against it", you have no right whatsoever to whine about it, because by doing nothing against it, you ACCEPT it. (by you I don't mean especially you, but everyone doing the above ;)
Free speech means I have the right to whine about everything I want. Even if I don't do anything about it. Yes, even if I'm actively promoting it!
Of course it does nothing good for my credibility if I promote something and at the same time whine about it, which means that it is not a good idea to do it. But that doesn't mean I don't have a right to do it.
Well, I guess I should do something against ACs posting such stupid things (after all, maybe someone with power will actually use that nonsense as argument to restrict freedom of speech accordingly). Maybe hacking Slashdot and removing those posts would be a reasonable counter measure? ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(and still German politicians call this a constitutional state)!
being a constitutional state is no trick. Having a good constitution is.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Not being moral doesn't mean being immoral, in my opinion there are many things that are morally neutral, such a sexual preference.
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 ----
Read up on your political party.
Make sure they do not have another "German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen" in waiting.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
BKA vs FBI
BKA is for federal criminal cases.
BND is for outside for Germany intel gathering.
BfV is the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
They protect democratic Germany from the far left, far right, foreigners and cults.
In Germany COINTELPRO can get real fun.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.