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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
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
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. ;-)
To error is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the OS.
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.
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
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.
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...
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...
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.
"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
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!
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.