"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.
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.
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?
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...
First of all this law has to pass the "Bundesrat", the representation of the 16 "Bundesländer" (states of Germany).
If this council passes the law one still has the opportunity to "go to Karlsruhe", which means appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court that is located in Karlsruhe.
In the german online community this has been the hot topic of the last weeks and the german pirate party (http://piratenpartei.de/) has mainly focused on this issue .
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.
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?
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.