Fwd: Police shuts down Internet service provider in Austria !

[holger@deep.hb.provi.de (Holger Bruns)]

In article <333512BA.790C@stpoelten.com> Claus Pfleger <cpfleger@stpoelten.com> writes:
>Message-ID: <333512BA.790C@stpoelten.com>
>Date: Sun, 23 Mar 1997 12:23:38 +0100
>From: Claus Pfleger <cpfleger@stpoelten.com>
>Reply-To: cpfleger@stpoelten.com
>X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (Win95; I)
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Newsgroups: de.soc.zensur
>Subject: Police shuts down Internet service provider in Austria !
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>NNTP-Posting-Host: 194.96.101.20
>Lines: 76
>Path: nordwest.pop.de!news.hamburg.pop.de!news.hamburg.ecrc.net!news.berlin.ecrc.net!news.ecrc.de!02-newsfeed.univie.ac.at!news.via.at!194.96.101.20
>Xref: nordwest.pop.de de.soc.zensur:4142


>Urgent information - please pass to everyone interested especially to
>opinion leaders - we need every international help and solidarity we can
>get !!!

>Austrian police shuts down Internet Service Provider 

>What happended so far ?

>The Munich district attorney passed a clue to Austria last year that a
>Internet Service Provider has a picture containing pornographic material
>on his news server.

>Now, at least about one year after that clue criminal investigation
>department in Vienna takes action and confiscates the hole equipment of
>an Austrian ISP at will - ind order to secure some evidence (which won t
>be found any more because of the short lifetime of this data within a
>newsgroupserver).

>Besides the financial loss that the ISP (ViP-net) now has to cope with
>there couldn t be seen any sensitiviness watching the acting officers by
>confiscating (maybe there should hang a manual near every computer
>dealing with how to shutdown it).

>Even the stand alone bookkeeping department system which wasn t hangig
>on the Net was confiscated and all bachup tapes. The cops didn t take
>use of an expert.  

>To get things right - it is not that we say that criminal prosecution of
>a user uploading illegal material would be wrong - we say yes to
>prosecution on illegal dealing users.

>But the ISP is technically not able to supervise the hole data running
>over his systems and lines and to censor it.

>To eliminate the ISP commercial existence then with action at will
>should not be expected in a country like Austria every day but similar
>actions against other ISP and their costumers can happen again.

>To make things worse:

>In this case the ISP isn t even accused - he is going to be destroyed
>for evidence purpose.

>So far it isn t clear how that illegal data came into the network of the
>ISP (maybe mail or news ?).
>It is also unknown who passed the clue to the authorities (anonymized
>clue).

>Some could say somebody tries to make mood for the planned media law.
>How practical that the judge in order (as known so far Mrs. Dr. Helene
>Partik-Pable, member of a politicially right orientated Austrian party)
>can act free and help to make law and order.

>In Austria such a mad action can hit almost everybody not - only ISP.
>Based on todays legal situation it seems watching the practice that it
>is possible to confiscate a companies equipment and secret papers for a
>long time at any time.

>More background:

>The ISP is trying to get up an emergency service but is unable to
>reactivate his around 4000 users (with a high quantitiy of professional
>and commercial users) because there aren t any backup files or even
>booking papers.

>To protest against that action more and more ISP and privat homepages
>show black background and on the comming Tuesday hole Austria won t be
>reachable via Internet from 9.00 am to 3.00 pm local time because all
>ISP will shut down their service at that time to protest.


>Contact: Claus M. Pfleger (Master of Law, University Vienna, lawyer in
>Austria)
>E-Mail: cpfleger@stpoelten.com, webmaster@stpoelten.com

>or even better e-mail to the Chancellor of Austria: vklima@spoe.or.at