Personal stuff

According to this article (German), a satirical website criticising the German government was taken off-line by the BMI (German Ministry of Internal Affairs) and BVA (German Office of Administration). This was done due to the usage of "Hoheitszeichen" (national insignia) and because of the similarity to the original website.

This shows us a point or two:

- The BMI and BVA are actively trying to censor critics. (Using the "Hoheitszeichen" may be used in different locations by different people without problems).

- It is easy to block and remove websites from the Internet (In this case by simply asking!). So a logical conclusion would be that this would work even better for criminal and illegal websites.

- The BMI and BVA did in no way try to reason with the publisher of the page but instead simply asked the domain hoster to shut down the domain. I find this questionable, since the website itself is not illegal except for using potentially copyrighted material, so there is probably no legal basis for the shut-down, but instead the BMI/BVA may have abused their power as a government institution to achieve this.

The website is back up with some changes and can now be seen here.

Also, this website is supposedly facing legal action from a company that created the original "Du bist Deutschland!" campaign. Source: Here at netzpolitik.org. In my opinion, yet another attempt to cripple free speech.

A couple of groups have demanded that the planned censorship laws should be made even stronger:

German article at netzpolitik.org.

One of these groups is the "Interessenverband des Video- und Medienfachhandels in Deutschland e.V. (IVD)" roughly translated to
"Interest group of Video and Media marketing in Germany". The others are mostly child care groups, many of them closely related
in some way to the politicians that brought this law onto the table in the first place.

The PDF published requests that (among others):

- The law should not directly state the technical nature of the blocking mechanisms. (So it can be adapted to future technologies?!).
- A more powerful blocking mechanism than pure DNS- Blocking should be used. (Hey, how about just shutting down the servers, that's pretty good, and we wouldn't need a new law to do it?).
- Laws should be changed to state that everyone below 18 is considered a "child". (In Germany, this currently is at 14, where the age between 14, 16 and 18 is handled differently).
- The list of blocked sites remains to be secret. (If the content could simply be deleted or completely blocked, there would be no reason to keep this list secret, aside from hindering people to find out that also non- illegal sites are put on the list).

Especially having a group in there that is definitely interested in abusing this list to fight copyright issues shows that this blocking law will be used for other sites than it was intended for!