This time I am doing a blog post in English. It’s not my native tongue, but I hope you can bear with it. The reason I am writing this blog entry in English is the current censorship law proposal. You might have heard about the German federal government planing to establish a censorship system for the internet. Superficially speaking, they tell you it is to fight child pornography, but they are already thinking out loud about expanding this instruments. Sites about Ego-Shooters have already been announced to be the next target. File sharing sites will surely follow.
A lot of people stood up against it, by signing a petition to the German Parliament („Deutscher Bundestag“). It was Tuesday I realized, that the right to sign a petition is granted to everyone by our constitution. This means there is no restriction to age, citizenship or residence. So even you people out there in the other countries can sign it, if you want to show, that you do not want a democratic state to employ instruments of censorship. Sadly it’s not that easy, since the e-petition-sytem ist only in German. But if you want to give it a shot, read on. We have some information in English here.
The petition can be found on the website of the Bundestag. It translates as follows:
Text of the petition
We demand, that the German Bundestag declines the amendments to the telemedia law according to the proposal of the federal government of the 22nd of April 2009. We consider the proposed procedure of letting the BKA [remark: „Bundeskriminalamt“, German Federal Police Administration] index websites and providers blocking them untransparent and uncontrollable, since the „block lists“ can not be inspected, nor are the criteria for putting a web site on the list properly defined. We see a danger for the civil liberty of informational freedom.
Explanation
The overall goal – protecting children, preventing them from being abused and stopping the spreading of child pornography – is not questioned by us. On the contrary, it is in everyones interest. But the proposed methods are totally unsuitable, which was confirmed on many occasions by experts of a lot different areas. Blocking of websites has no remarkable influence on the physical and mental integrity of abused children.
For everyone willing to support us, one of our members has made a screencast tutorial on how to sign the petition:
Habe es nach Reddit gepostet: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldpolitics/comments/8rw81/please_sign_the_epetition_against_the_german/
I apologise that my German is terrible, much worse than your English.
There is a international troubling tendency, whose source I have serious trouble detecting, and that is to force censorship into the „free“ western societies, lately it has been seen in Denmark whose constituition directly forbids censorship in any form, so the censorship was introduced to the society as a voluntary filter that ISP’s would offer, however, there is no way of choosing not to have the filter (unless you use an alternate DNS).. This filter was introduced to combat child pornography, but has since been extended to include music sites that sell in a way the Danish music industry does not like (allofmp3.com), then again extended to ThePirateBay.org, and the government are planning to add gambling sites that do no pay taxes to the Danish government, and thus breaching the government gambling monopoly. All of this in breach of the Danish constitution ?
A similar filter has shown it self i Australia, where a scandal has ensued, because it turned out that the filter contained many things out side of it’s mandate, including an Australian Dentist, An Anti-Abortion site, and a whole slew of other things completely irrelevant to the stated intention. Apparently they wish to have the wording similar to the English censorship laws, where „objectional content“ could be added to the filter. Question is objectional to whom ? (one slippery road indeed).
I am sensing that it won’t be long before a general EU law will be passed to enable Censorship, and thus demanding it from all EU countries.
If combating child pornography and child abuse was the „Real target“ (sorry to go conspiracy theory on you), then would it not be a much better way to go, to create a „Global Anti Child Abuse Force“, whose juristiction is the entire world, and can investigate that type of criminality internationally ? Rather than choosing to „hide“ the problem ?
I’m afraid that it will soon become necessary to form some sort of global privacy watch dog force, or we might loose our highly treasured Freedom, which we all enjoy.
– It’s painless to loose freedom, but it cost blood and lives to regain it.
Soweit ich weiß wird „Ego-Shooter“ im englischsprachigen Bereich nicht oder falsch verstanden, besser wäre hier meines Wissens nach „First person shooter“.
[…] στο ίντερνετ με πρόσχημα το κυνήγι της παιδεραστίας. Εδώ μπορείτε να βρείτε το κείμενο υπογραφών ενάντια στο […]
[…] SPD yesterday over concerns about Internet censorship. The German Pirate Party had been running a petition against an attempt by the German government to have a censorship list, which, although at first […]
[…] στο ίντερνετ με πρόσχημα το κυνήγι της παιδεραστίας. Εδώ μπορείτε να βρείτε το κείμενο υπογραφών ενάντια στο […]
[…] SPD yesterday over concerns about Internet censorship. The German Pirate Party had been running a petition against an attempt by the German government to have a censorship list, which, although at first […]