Wednesday, 11. September 2002

Internet censorship in Germany

http://md.hudora.de/blog/bgems/images/zensur.png" align="right">For nearly one year there is going one a farce in Northrhine-Westfalia, one of germany's 16 states. The district government of Düsseldorf asked local providers last fall to "block" access to four webpages. http://www.nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com, http://www.stormfront.org, http://www.front14.org should be blocked for hate speech and http://www.rotten.com for promoting violence and war and for inhuman exposure of people. The hatepages are clearly verboten by german criminal law and there is no much room for discussion that rotten.com is at least inapropriate for minors. So publication of all four sides is a crime over here and the content itself is illegal in Germany. The district government asked the Sites by mail to remove the content - they didn't.

But we have a law in Germany which states that the access provider (ISP) has to block access to illegal content if this is possible and does not hurt the ISP beyond reasonaability ("zumutbar"). Up to then it was consensus that it is not technically possible to block internet sites while keeping the Internet in a way we know it. But the district gonvernment claimed that it was possible.

So some Providers started redirecting the IP addresses of the four sites by hacking their own recursive DNS resolvers ("DNS Servers") they where providing to their customers. In Apring 2002 the district government sent a order to 80 ISPs to block http://www.stormfront.org http://www.nazi-lauck-nsdapao.com by either:

"1. Exclusion of the Domains in the Domain-Server. In case the Accesprovider deploys a DNS this can be configured in a way that requests will not be routed at the right server but to an nonexistent or another predefined page.
2. Usage of a Proxy-Server. The URL as a destinctive key for a individual webpage on the server can be blocked by using a proxy. Request to a illegal webpage will be filtered and access will be denied or it will be redirected to a predefined page in the browser and informed.
3. Exclusion of IPs by blocking at the router. The Router can be configured in a way that all datatraffic to a certain IP will not be routed."

Also the district government initiated a test of other filtering mechanisms. To my knowledge they didn't ask the Chinese for knowledge transfer. Legal battles, demonstrations etc. followed during the summer. Yesterday the district government ordered the providers to immediately block the sides.

You might want to watch at the machine translation of a Documentation collected by the CCC; there is also an english page on the subject by the organizers of the demonstrations.
09:28 | #

disLEXia, a research project by Maximillian Dornseif