more
information, sources, backgrounds (in German)For newsworthy english informations about internet censorship in germany read our english info pages about Internet Censorship (not only) in Germany or a our Summary about Internet Censorship in Germany as PDF.
The following press release is from April 2002.
Press release, April 2002
The german companies Bocatel, Webwasher and Intranet develop together with the
University of Dortmund an internet censorship system, which should be able to
deny the access to selected URLs for everybody: a combination of intelligent
routers with a transparent proxy and a centrally managed database of unwanted
URLs, Ports and IPs.
See http://www.bocatel.de/filterpilot/ and http://www.bocatel.de/Docs/2001-1219-Strategiepapier_Filtering1.pdf for details (both german only).
At the moment the access providers in the german Bundesland (federal state)
Northrine-Westfalia are forced to use DNS-Spoofing to supress the access to
two domains: stormfront.org and nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com; they plan to "filter" about 6000 foreign web sites! The local government
initiates the development of the Bocatel/Webwasher filter solution and there
is no doubt, that in the near future they will censor thousands of websites:
the local government collects a wishlitsts of "unmoral" and unwanted
pages which should be blocked:
http://www.brd.nrw.de/cat/SilverStream/Pages/themenframe?BeitragsID=2071
There are still plans to block rotten.com and Google (no joke!) – Google because it's cache.
The internet initiative ODEM and the german
hacker organisation Chaos Computer Club (CCC)
now perform an online petition
and real life demonstration
against internet censorship and for freedom
of information in the internet.
Although the censorship system will be first used in germany, there is no doubt
that it will be sold and installed worldwide. There are a lot of organisations,
which will be interested in such a next generation of censorware, e.g. MPAA;
IFPI, Scientology etc. So please sign the petition!
http://odem.org/informationsfreiheit/en/
http://www.netzzensur.de/index_en.html
The district government of Düsseldorf county, Northrhine-Westfalia in Germany,
is forcing Internet Service Providers to block access to selected foreign Internet
sites.
The project was started with forbidding access to two right wing extremist sites hosted in the United States. Fighting right wing extremist ideologies reaches a broad consensus in Germany; however in this case it is used to gain acceptance for the establishment of a nationwide centralized filtering and blocking system.
Future plans contain blocking of content to protect minors, copyrights and consumer rights, including search engines that fail accordance with corresponding national guidelines and laws.
Together with corporate partners, Northrhine-Westfalia administration is developing a high capacity filtering system that is currently tested at the university of Dortmund. Intention is to create an architecture with centrally controlled blocking mechanisms that should be installed on gateway machines to the "foreign internet".
The Chaos Computer Club and ODEM regard this as a severe threat to the citizens' right of informational freedom. Not to be able to get information about political activity from publicly available sources must be considered a societal backstep for democracy.
A demonstration against this blocking plans will take place on the 6th of April on the streets of Düsseldorf. More information about this action can be found at http://www.netzzensur.de/index_en.html
ODEM asks concerned users of the Internet to sign their declaration for the freedom of information. First signers already include Richard Stallman, Iac Clarke, journalist organizations like the "reporters without borders", scientists and politicians.
http://odem.org/informationsfreiheit/en/
more
information, sources, backgrounds (in German)
Contact persons: