Germany Legislates For Mandatory Web Filters
Found on Slashdot on Wednesday, 14 January 2009
Germany's Minister for Families has announced a legislative initiative to force ISPs to implement a government-mandated block list (in English), which will be updated daily.
As usual, this is being brought in under the 'fight child porn' guise. The minister is quoted as saying: 'We must not water down the problem' in reply to being challenged that this law and technology could be used to censor other content. She then went on to say: 'I can't know what wishes and plans future governments will develop.'
I so hate those political idiots who blur out statements like that. There's no place where hosting child porn is legal, so if you find a server, write to the ISP and it goes offline. Censorship won't help those kids; it will only stop people from looking at it via your everyday browser session. Pedophiles (not the "oops I saw a pic" but the serious ones) have moved to encrypted networks and darknets long ago. Now guess if such a list can stop them? Right, it can't. They won't even notice it. So, the politicians are doing nothing to help children or protect them from abuse. In fact, they make it worse for them because they want to make it look like there is none. But the nice uncle from across the road won't stop just because a few websites are blocked. And we've seen how reliable those lists are when Wikipedia and Wayback got listed.