Internet Censorship in Germany

Germany has announced that it will introduce compulsory Internet censorship starting in March.

The censorship scheme will block access to child pornography, and will follow a similar model to Norway, where the Government decrees a list of child pornography sites to be blocked by ISP’s.

Germany Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen addressed concerns that the censorship regime could exclude other content by confirming that it may be extended: We must not dilute the issue. Child pornography is a problem issue and clearly identifiable. [However] you can not exclude what the federal government may wish to block in the future.

Several German ministries seem to be in a footrace to draft legal text for a filtering regime blocking child pornography from German users’ personal computers agreed by the government last week.

Initiated by the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) the government has debated for months how to step up blocking of child pornography from servers outside of the country. Now the Justice Minister has announced a draft special law. The Economics Minister pointed to the already ongoing review of the German Telemedia Law, a law covering rights and obligations of telecommunication media content providers. The obligation to block access to child pornography sites listed by a government agency would fit in there.

The German government pointed to an announcement by the European Commission from earlier last week that systems to block access to websites containing child pornography will be developed and to existing systems in Denmark, Finland, Italy and Norway.

BMFSFJ Minister Ursula von der Leyen (Christian Democratic Party), in a debate in the German Parliament last week reiterated: The rights of children carry more weight than unhindered mass communication. Von der Leyen for months has pushed fervently for a quick private agreement with big internet service providers (ISPs) including Deutsche Telekom, Arcor or 1und1 Internet.

Yet Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries and members of Parliament from her own party and the Green Party warned against a contractual solution. The filtering regime must be dealt with in a regular law because it could touch on fundamental rights of citizens and requires policies for liability for possible errors. In addition, Germany’s federal police - designated as contract partner for the ISP and manager for the list of child pornography sites according to existing law - has no competence in dealing with other than terrorism when it comes to preventive action.

Zypries welcomed that some ISPs had agreed with von der Leyen to work right away on the technical implementation that is necessary in the servers of the companies. When a special law is ready, expected by summer, technical implementation will be in place, too, she said.

Zypries also underlined that blocking of internet addresses alone might not be enough. We should go deeper than that, she said. Criminal prosecution also is a must, she said. If and how information collected through the filtering regime should trigger prosecution has not been discussed so far. A page with a stop-sign to which users trying to access child pornography sites will be redirected can only inform users why this special site is not available. Yet it also is possible to log users’ IP addresses during this process allowing authorities to identify and prosecute them.

Five of Germany's eight major Internet service providers — Deutsche Telekom's T-Online, Vodafone's Arcor, Kabel Deutschland, Telefonica's O2 and Alice's Hansenet — signed a legally binding agreement with the government and the Federal Crime Office, agreeing to install software to block consumer access to child pornography sites. The five companies together cover around 75% of the German market.

Software blocks installed by the ISPs will redirect consumers attempting to click on blacklisted websites to a red stop sign. The Federal Crime Office has compiled a blacklist of 1,000 sites, which is updated daily.

Under the agreement, the ISPs have six months to install the page blockers.

The German cabinet is expected to announce changes to the telecommunications law by summer that would force the remaining Internet providers to block child porn sites.

A petition against legislation designed to block harmful websites, such as those dedicated to child pornography, has collected more than 50,000 signatures after being posted online four days ago.

That number is the minimum required by German law for parliament to open hearings on the issue.

The petition started by Berlin resident Franziska Heine, is in response to a telemedia bill which was approved by the German cabinet last month, but still requires parliamentary approval.

The proposed legislation would require the vast majority of the country's internet service providers to block child pornography sites, as identified by the German Federal Criminal Office (BKA).

Heine claims the bill threatens the fundamental right to freedom of the internet. They see the BKA list as a tool for censorship.

The petition was placed on the German parliament's website and organisers are hoping to reach 100,000 signatures by June 16.

German Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen is struggling to pass a new law designed to combat online child pornography in the face of widespread concern over censorship and freedom of speech. The law would use blacklists to bar access to specific sites.

Von der Leyen proposes setting up an office in the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation to determine whether or not sites should be blocked. Lists would then be sent to Internet service providers, which would be responsible for blocking the content.

The list would contain an estimated 1,500 sites. Von der Leyen says blocking them could derail 450,000 hits a day. The personal data and ISP addresses of people trying to access blocked sites would not be captured.

The bill would be the first time in the history of post-war Germany that police would be granted the authority to determine what can and cannot be shown by the mass media. Right now, the legislation doesn't call for any supervision of the proposed agency.

Opponents of the bill say the proposal threatens the freedom of the Internet, and that blocks on Web sites and other censorship measures are easily bypassed and ineffective. Thus far, almost 100,000 people have signed a petition against the measure, twice what the law requires to force a discussion in German parliament. One fear is that the list, once established, could be used to censor other sites. Opponents also argue that blocking Web sites is ineffective against child pornographers, who tend to distribute material through e-mail, peer-to-peer systems and chatrooms, all of which are much harder to police.

Social Democratic parliamentarian Gregor Amann said on Wednesday that he doubted the bill would succeed due to concerns over its threats to personal freedoms: Since I know many of my colleagues in the SPD share my opinion on this question, at this point I would say that this bill will either not pass in this legislative period or will be dramatically changed.

Politicians from the nation's two major parties agreed on a final version of Germany's internet filtering bill Monday night, reports Gigaom. The bill could now be approved as soon as Thursday.

Free-speech advocates, Internet activists and Internet service providers have opposed the bill and suggest denial-of-service blocking does not work, with concerns this will take the government into areas of greater Internet censorship.

Under the measure, German federal police would compile a block list containing the domain names and IP addresses of websites hosting and linking to child porn. ISPs would be required to block the sites and redirect all traffic to a site or sites hosting a warning message in the form of a red Stop sign.

An official online petition against the bill has received more than 130,000 signatures and counting, plus the number of citizens trying to sign the petition has reportedly brought down the parliament's Web infrastructure several times.

ISPs had voiced opposition to provisions in the measure that would mandate that they log each attempt to access a blocked site and share the information with law enforcement organizations. This would include anyone who might accidentally click on the wrong link, even if it was placed by a hacker. In turn, an innocent person could be labeled a pedophile, and with that possibility in mind, lawmakers removed that portion of the bill requiring ISP logs.

The German parliament passed a bill Thursday imposing censorship of pornographic websites justified by the need to protect children.

The legislation was proposed by a coalition of German social democratic and conservative parties. It requires the country's federal criminal investigators to maintain a list of websites accused of containing child pornography and to distribute it to German ISPs, which will then be required to block queries to those websites with a stop sign.

In its present form, the bill requires only that ISPs display the warning sign. Users will still be able to access the flagged websites, but they will be advised that viewing child pornography is illegal. German legislators also bowed to criticism by adding a sunset clause that will see the law expire in three years.

A German MP from the ruling Social Democrats (SDP) has resigned from the party and joined the Pirate Party in response to new censorship laws in the country.

Jörg Tauss was one of only four members of the Bundestag to vote against the censorship legislation. The German laws, unlike those from other totalitarian regimes like Iran, China and Australia, are focused strictly on child pornography, however there are deep concerns in Germany that once implemented the laws could easily be extended to other areas.

While Tauss has become the first member of the Pirate Party in the German Parliament, he has indicated that he won't be standing for re-election in September. Germany's election system makes it difficult for stand alone candidates to be elected or re-elected.

German President Horst Köhler has hammered another nail in the coffin of a controversial law to block child pornography on the internet by refusing to sign it, news magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday.

Köhler has asked for supplementary information, the Spiegel report said.

The law, which critics argue would block access to other, innocent sites and therefore amounted to censorship, could breach Germany's constitution, experts believe.

Merkel's party and their new partners in government, the pro-business Free Democrats – who opposed the measure – agreed during coalition negotiations last month not to put the law into practice. But because it had already been passed by both houses of the German parliament, it could not simply be dropped. Köhler refusal to sign it means it is now effectively stalled until the new government finds a constitutional way to kill it.

According to a Saturday report in business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger had agreed to kibosh the law by ordering the federal police not to act upon it. However, that would leave the law hanging in place.

A new bill to censor Germany's internet has been signed into law by Germany's president. There's only one problem: The government has decided it no longer wants it. They are now in the awkward position of relying on opposition help to repeal the legislation. 

The German coalition government, which pairs Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives with the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, has decided it no longer wants the law, which was massively opposed by Internet users. Instead of blocking access to Web sites, it now wants to delete offensive Internet content instead.

The SPD is now set to introduce a bill before the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament, on Feb. 25 which would repeal the new law, thereby overturning the legal basis for blocking Internet access.

The original Access Impediment Law was hugely controversial in Germany. There was massive opposition from Internet activists, who saw it as an attempt to censor the Web and an attack on the right to freedom of expression. Users feared that access to harmless sites could also be blocked and that the access restrictions could easily be circumnavigated by savvy surfers.

The issue also caused a certain amount of political fallout. Then Family Minister Ursula von der Leyen, a member of the CDU who is now German labor minister, was behind the initiative to combat child pornography. Critics dubbed her Zensursula, a portmanteau word combining her name and the German word for censorship. The issue also cost the SPD support among Internet users and helped boost the newly founded Pirate Party, which campaigned in the 2009 election on an Internet freedom and civil rights platform and got an impressive 2% of the total vote.

On 22 February 2011 the German Working Group against Internet Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) submitted their complaint against the German law on Internet blocking to Germany's Constitutional Court.

AK Zensur and many others had fiercely opposed the law and announced that a complaint would be filed when the law was enacted by Parliament in June 2009.

A curious situation emerged when the government changed after the elections in September 2009, taking the liberal party FDP into power in a coalition with the conservative CDU/CSU. The FDP had opposed the blocking law in their election campaign, and before the law came into force, it was agreed that it would not be fully implemented.

In a legally strange move, a non-application directive by the Interior minister stipulated that initially, only take-down was to be attempted, and the governing parties agreed that a review would be held about a year later.

This created something of a legal absurdity as the consequences of the law are not fully felt at the moment when the deadline to complain is expiring. But AK Zensur and its lawyers are confident that even now, many aspects of the law are in clear violation of the German Constitution, and several experts had voiced similar concerns at a parliamentary hearing before the law was enacted. While political support for the ill-fated law has widely diminished, the governing parties have not found the will to abolish it in a new Parliamentary act. AK Zensur is hopeful that with its complaint, it will be able to do the politicians' homework for them.

A website collecting signatures to support the complaint in the political debate will be started soon.

Germany is to repeal controversial legislation intended to block access to child-pornography sites on the internet, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

She had led protests by German libertarians against the legislation, which was was passed in 2009 but never implemented. Opponents contended that it opened the way to web censorship, since it set up mechanisms that could also be used by a dictatorial government to block politically offensive websites.

ISPs would have been required to block page requests for child porn and to instead display a stop sign.

The minister said German police were now coping with the problem differently, tracking down servers with child-porn images and demanding that the server owners delete the images. German federal police have a web-porn department that tips off foreign police forces about child-abuse websites.

An inter-state treaty that will overhaul Germany's gambling restrictions could prove a threat to the open net. Should a recent draft be adopted, ISPs would be obliged to prevent users from accessing unauthorized gambling websites, which critics fear will mean the establishment of a censorship infrastructure that would breach constitutional rights.

A draft of the treaty sent to the European Union for approval in April includes a paragraph which has been widely interpreted as a provision for the introduction of Internet filtering as a means of blocking out foreign and unlicensed gambling websites:

[Translated from German] The gambling superintendent can [...], after prior publication of unauthorized gambling services, interdict service providers in the sense of the tele-media act, in particular access providers and registrars, participation in providing access to unauthorized gambling services.

Commenting on an earlier draft of the same treaty, the Chaos Computer Club had warned that Internet service providers might be forced to implement deep packet inspection in order to prevent clients from accessing foreign gambling websites. In particular, mention of an impact on the constitutional right to telecommunications secrecy, meaning that content information would be accessed, makes an intention to introduce deep packet inspection plausible.

The new gambling treaty has to be signed by 13 of Germany's 16 federal states to become effective. So far, the issue has raised controversy in a range of states governed by coalitions of Greens (against the proposal) and Social Democrats (for the proposal.

The issue has become particularly controversial in Northrine-Westphalia when recently it was discovered that for more than a year, there are already two district-level blocking orders (in German) against gambling websites. These were based on the old gambling treaty, but have been disputed in court by the two ISPs in concern. As a Telekom speaker explained, the company perceives website blocking as requiring an unconstitutional breach of telecommunications secrecy.

The prime ministers of the federal states have now decided to delay a final decision on the gambling treaty to October.

Germany's lower house of Parliament has repealed a law enabling website blocking iof websites containing child pornography.

The Bundestag's 2009 law enabled a list of sites compiled by Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office to be blocked by ISPs.

However the law was denounced as soon as it was passed and the repeal process was put into effect.

The criticism was that internet blocks are easy to work round via proxies and that putting them on a blocked list rather lets such websites off the hook, as they have seemingly been dealt with. And of course the websites are effectively vanished to decent folks, so there will be no further complaints for the authorities to act upon.

The only way to prevent such sites from being viewed is to delete them, Internet expert Jimmy Schulz said, by alerting the individual Internet service providers.