[FYI] (Fwd) FC: German government pressures ISPs to block "offensive" sites

["Axel H Horns" <horns@ipjur.com>]

------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent:      	Wed, 11 Sep 2002 23:15:43 -0400
To:             	politech@politechbot.com
From:           	Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Subject:        	FC: German government pressures ISPs to block "offensive" sites
Send reply to:  	declan@well.com


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Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 10:18:09 +0200
Subject: More Internet Censorship in Chin^h^h^h^h Germany
From: "Doobee R.Tzeck" <drt@un.bewaff.net>
To: declan@well.com

http://md.hudora.de/blog/categories/originalContent/2002/09/11.html#a7
46

Internet censorship in Germany

For nearly one year there is going one a farce in
Northrhine-Westfalia, one of germany's 16 states. The district
government of Düsseldorf asked local providers last fall to "block"
access to four webpages. http://www.nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com,
http://www.stormfront.org, http://www.front14.org should be blocked
for hate speech and http://www.rotten.com for promoting violence and
war and for inhuman exposure of people. The hatepages are clearly
verboten by german criminal law and there is no much room for
discussion that rotten.com is at least inapropriate for minors. So
publication of all four sides is a crime over here and the content
itself is illegal in Germany. The district government asked the Sites
by mail to remove the content - they didn't. But we have a law in
Germany which states that the access provider (ISP) has to block
access to illegal content if this is possible and does not hurt the
ISP beyond reasonaability ("zumutbar"). Up to then it was consensus
that it is not technically possible to block internet sites while
keeping the Internet in a way we know it. But the district gonvernment
claimed that it was possible.

So some Providers started redirecting the IP addresses of the four
sites by hacking their own recursive DNS resolvers ("DNS Servers")
they where providing to their customers. In Apring 2002 the district
government sent a order to 80 ISPs to block http://www.stormfront.org
http://www.nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com by either:

"1. Exclusion of the Domains in the Domain-Server. In case the
Accesprovider deploys a DNS this can be configured in a way that
requests will not be routed at the right server but to an nonexistent
or another predefined page. 2. Usage of a Proxy-Server. The URL as a
destinctive key for a individual webpage on the server can be blocked
by using a proxy. Request to a illegal webpage will be filtered and
access will be denied or it will be redirected to a predefined page in
the browser and informed. 3. Exclusion of IPs by blocking at the
router. The Router can be configured in a way that all datatraffic to
a certain IP will not be routed."

Also the district government initiated a test of other filtering
mechanisms. To my knowledge they didn't ask the Chinese for knowledge
transfer. Legal battles, demonstrations etc. followed during the
summer. Yesterday the district government ordered the providers to
immediately block the sides.

You might want to watch at the machine translation of english page on
the subject at

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.ccc.de/censorship/&
langpair=de|en&hl=en&i

a Documentation collected by the CCC there is also an english page on
the subject by the people who organized the demonstration at

http://www.netzzensur.de/index_en.html




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