German Internet Politics

Here we go, I start blogging TODAY! My first blog is going to cover something the German internet based community has been experiencing over the last month: Politicians making laws to govern the internet. That alone would not be the problem, if only they would not prove to be completely clueless concerning internet issues.

What's the matter with politics these days?

Alright, here's a summary of what happened: German Minister for family and social affairs Ursula von der Leyen (called Zensursula, mixing up her name with the word for censorship) brought a bill into parliament called "Law against child pornography." This law aims at using access blocking technology (similar to Denmark, Norway and other countries) to give the BKA (German equivalent of FBI [correct me if I'm wrong]) the right to block certain websites from being visited. If you have a German ISP and visit a blocked page, you will just see a big stop-sign.

Soon after this bill was introduced to the public, the community started to react. Franziska Heine, a 29-year-old Berlin resident, started an e-Petition to the German parliament ("Bundestag"). The 50.000 signers needed for the petition to be heard by the Bundestag were collected within few days. By the time this law passed the Bundestag, 134.000 Germans signed the petition. That makes for the biggest collection of signers in German political history. It did not impress the parlamentarians...

 

What do these internet-nerds want?

Criticism revolves around 2 major points. One being it's uneffectiveness against child pornography. German crime reports indicates that child pornography is not a growing problem but rather a steady one. Numbers have been constant throughout the years; only 2007 shows a spike - because a closed community of picture-sharers was busted. In the view of the community, a sight-blocker does not fight the crime. To put it in the words of Volker Pispers, a comedian: "A policeman sees a rape happening. Does he now start to cover up the crime scene?" This picture (title: FINALLY Ursula von der Leyen has a solution for homeless people!) is a great metaphor on why sight-blocking does not help. A better solution is deleting the data from the servers, something the German community has proven to be an effective means. No matter where the server-admin was located, when notified by an email they quickly removed the disturbing content (found on the Danish ban-list. The obviously did not try to have it deleted, or they're not good at emailing over there).

Quite in contrary: A list of child-pornography websites would be a great resource for pedos as to were to look for their pictures. And the access-blocking being DNS-based, it's EXTREMELY easy to crack (aka 30 secs of messing with your browser options or the providers using IPs instead of URLs). And data saved to online-places - such as the planned ban-list - is bound to be leaked sooner or later - at least some of the lists of the other countries have. And their data is extremely disturbing...

The second major point for the critics is that infrastructural needs for censorship of the internet are being established (ab)using a good cause. The banlists from the other countries (Denmark being the example here) have a lot of sites on them. Few of them are child-pornography related. There are all kinds of political sites there, gay community sites. One site linked to a site that linked to wikileaks.com that linked to the published banlist. The guy running the first page got his computer seized by the Danish police (again: he linked to a place that linked to a place that linked to a site that might be worth banning. Can you spell official arbitrariness?)

What happenend then?

Nothing. The German parliament added a few lines to the bill. Still, the ban-list is to be written by the BKA and be kept secret. So they investigate AND dish out the punishment (being blocked). The list - samples of it, that is - is to be checked quarterly by the office of the governmental advisor for personal data protection. The current inhabitor of this office already stated that he is NOT a judge and NOT an investigator but an advisor for personal data protection. German Law and Constitution experts are warning from the implications of the law considering the separation of powers and censorship.134k people signed.

Meanwhile, prominent CDU (Zensursula's political pary, the Christian Democratic Union) members have stated that they want access blocking to be applied to other fields on the internet. Copyright and music-piracy are obvious choices, but one especially ill-leaded man already touched the topic "killer-games." 

And still, the law passed the Bundestag...

Politicians show a complete lack of understanding of the internet. Not only can they not understand the technology (how easy it is to surpass access blocking as opposed to finding the new URL of your porn-provider; even in China all you need is a USB-stick), they fail to understand the way opinion is being made on the net. It is not enough anymore to present a threat ("Iraq" or "Terrorism" or "child pornography") to pass a law restricting personal freedom ("homeland security" or"USA PATRIOT Act"). If you don't want the majority of the inter net users uniting against you, you better prepare arguments instead of just words. I'm waiting for the governmental parties in Germany to be punished for the way they treated their voters. I'm hoping for it. And I'm in the Piratenpartei now! Peace!