(c) The Guardian, UK, 26 sep 96


CYBERLIFE UK Jim McClellan
Germany calling


MPs with responsibilities for all things wired like to present the UK
as well placed to take advantage of the information age. We may not be
up there with the US, they say, but we're treating our European
neighbours with the same "eat my dust" attitude Damon Hill showed Jean
Alesi last Sunday.

It might be nice to believe this, though I fear that our political
leaders may need an excuse along the lines of Hill's "clutch trouble".
But there is one area in which the UK is, thankfully, lagging behind
other European countries. When it comes to trying to censor the Net,
Germany has us licked.

This year a desire to prevent German Net users from accessing child
porn and Nazi propaganda led state prosecutors to put pressure on the
likes of CompuServe, AOL and T-Online. Despite the relative failures of
these actions, this month the German government attempted another
bizarre act of cross-border censorship. The target was a left-wing
magazine Radikal (which apparently contains advice on committing
terrorist acts, and is illegal in Germany), the foreign Web sites
hosting an electronic version of the magazine and German Internet
service providers (ISPs) that were enabling their users to access it.

Early this month, the ISPs moved to block German users from accessing
foreign sites holding versions of Radikal, in particular the Dutch ISP,
Access For All (http://www.xs4all.nl./). This was started three years
ago by Felipe Rodriquez and Rop Gongrijjp, of Dutch hacker group
Hacktic, and is one of the more non-conformist of Europe's ISPs. It was
recently involved in establishing the Dutch child pornography telephone
hotline (an experiment about to be imitated here).

Access for All alerted censorship campaigners to what was happening
(see Rodriquez's page on the affair:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~felipe/germany.html ). Net activists responded by
putting up mirrors of Radikal - at last count there were 47 worldwide.

Rodriquez remains bemused that no-one from the German government ever
contacted him about the offending material.

"The proper procedure would have been for them to contact the Dutch
Department of Justice . . . what happened was they started a block,
hoping we would lose customers. I think they were hoping we would be
forced into a situation where we had no choice but to remove this Web
site, which is ugly because it's a form of economic blackmail, and a
bizarre thing for a state to impose."

Rodriquez has been warned by German journalists that he might be
arrested if he travels to Germany. That would be ironic, since he
hasn't actually read the offending material (he doesn't speak German).

In reality, Rodriquez's problems are just ending. Early this week, the
Access For All user who had posted Radikal on his page voluntarily
removed it and Rodriquez expects the German ISPs to lift their block
shortly. He is pondering whether to sue the German authorities for
damages or take them to the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

As for the German government, their problems seem to be just starting.
Thanks to some hamfisted action, a little-known magazine they didn't
like is now all over the Net. "The big question is, will they now block
the 47 Radikal mirror sites," comments Rodriquez. "But if they do, it
could create an international scandal, because there are lots of US
sites involved."

On a more general level, what does he think will happen? "I think
problems like child pornography online can be tackled on a worldwide
level, because child pornography is forbidden almost everywhere. But
with other issues, legal systems are very different. So I think
eventually the German authorities will have to accept that there is
some information out there that they don't like and that they just
can't do anything about it."