

The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany - chibea
http://netzpolitik.org/2009/the-dawning-of-internet-censorship-in-germany/

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Andys
"The working group on censorship demonstrated the alternatives for instance by
actually removing over 60 websites containing child pornographic content in 12
hours, simply by emailing the international providers who then removed this
content from the net."

This is a great example of demonstrating the government's real intentions. If
a bunch of guys can send a few emails and take down 60 childporn sites, what
are the paid government enforcement agencies doing? Evidently, it has nothing
to do with child porn and everything to do with politics.

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Dilpil
The great irony is, Germany spends so much time combating anything related to
Nazism out of paranoia of a return to totalitarianism. And they don't see the
massive contradiction here.

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plesn
Just one though as I was looking at opera unite right now: if things go bad
with the net, this will be important, everyone, even non technical, will
easily host a proxy e.g...

By the way, in France our 3-strikes law was found unconstitutionnal, and this
law seems similarly dubious: do you guys in Germany have some institutions
that check this kind of cases?

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Tobias42
We have the "Bundesverfassungsgericht", our constituational court. It has
overruled some laws in the past. I don't know if anyone has filed a lawsuit
against the censorship yet. Let's hope for the best. I am really curious how
the Pirate Party is going to perform in the upcoming elections...

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stratomorph
I think _circumscribing_ would be a better choice of word here:

"...without introducing a censorship architecture and _circumcising_
constitutional freedoms."

The translation is fluent, and I shouldn't make fun of it, but that line made
me laugh.

On a more salient note, it's good to see that these proposals are not
proceeding without public notice. It's hard to fight the "FOR THE CHILDREN!"
brigade, but fortunately the Germans are having the debate openly, paying at
least lip service to constitutional process.

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voidpointer
The for-the-children brigade has been using its scheme for ages now and it is
still working. It seems to me that for such a well known strategy an effectve
counter-strategy should have been devised over the years. Yet, it seems to
work very well every time. Can anyone point us to some material about this
strategy in general, what counter-moves have been tried and how they worked
out in the past?

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garply
Just pointing out that the primary justification for Internet censorship in
China is also 'to protect children from pornography'.

