One of the Censorship Busters sent me the following with the comment: "Germany seems to be at it again."
The excerpt itself is titled "Good Night Germany." I assume it is a translation from a newspaper or press release article, because some of the syntax is a bit clumsy, but you will get the drift:
"There has been a new telecommunications law for Germany passed today. Besides some other problematic passages, there is a paragraph 85 and 87 that says that all online and telekom service providers (also internet and mailboxes) should provide a backdoor for state officials to get access to the data of their users (addresses, kind of services they are using).
Provider companies have so far only protested because they themselves should cover the costs for providing the technical structure for the state office to collect the data. Further(more), it should be set up in a way that the state has access to this data "anytime" and without the provider being able to notice it or to notify the users that their data are collected.
A new state office will be founded to "operate" this service for other state offices, called "Regulationsbehoerde".
'Nobody seems to be concerned with privacy or what is called in Germany Datenschutz. In a broader public there has so far been only one article in Die Zeit, and yesterday night a report on ZDF tv "Kennzeichen D".
Now some resistance is forming slowly in newsgroups. Nico Reichelt has set up a page at the institute for new media in Frankfurt.
As the wave of resistance is building up, . . . Nico has a problem with his small server getting too many hits, since it is only a small server on a 64kbit line. The info that he provides should be mirrored on other servers.
This is definitely an issue for some action. An article on telepolis will be out tomorrow. Follow this link to find out more.
Isn't it strange: Many people in Germany seemed to be concerned with the CDA but with something much worse in their own country nobody (or better: not many people so far) is doing anything about it.
Also on nettime there is silence about this case."
Here ends the notice that was sent to me. Simultaneously with this information, I received a little news clip from a related source. This fellow did not give me permission to quote from the entire text of an article that is entitled "The Price of Freedom." So I will have to paraphrase.
The gist of it is that, at least in America, the Constitution still has power. When the three-judge panel in Philadelphia recently declared the Commucations Decency Act unconstitutional, the effect of it was, according to this article,
". . . a swift and brutal civics lesson to Congress: You can't treat the Constitution like a rough draft. . . The price tag for that little romp through constitutional law is likely to amount to more than US$2 million."
He then goes on to say that although
". . . $2 million is a small price to pay for securing First Amendment rights in cyberspace, if Congress had its collective head screwed on right, the money would not have been spent in the first place. . . .
It needs to be said that this $2 million is a "soft" number, meaning it wasn't cut and pasted from the bottom line of a few spreadsheets.
Rather, it was dragged, cajoled, and extrapolated over the course of a three-week investigation that included more than two dozen interviews with government and private sources, along with the study of dozens of government documents."
I had asked him very nicely if I could quote the entire text. In response to my query, he wrote me back:
"No, you can't use that much of the text. You have my story, paraphrase it, but it you use that much word for word, it's a copyright violation.
But you're free to take the figures and explain what I wrote in your own words.
Also, Zundel had nothing to do with the "whole CDA mess" where the hell did you get that?"
This is a person I do not know, but I assume that he was "in" on the entire cyberspace drama that started at the beginning of this year with a New York Times article, January 10, in response to an Ernst Zundel fax sent January 8th, putting the SWC on notice that we were going to have what we then called the Cyberspace "Holocaust Debate" with Nizkor.
So I will tell him in my own words because he hasn't yet caught on:
By his own estimate, the United States of America taxpayers have now doled out an estimated $2 million-in a futile effort, as it turned out, thanks to some pretty healthy instincts still operating on this Continent-to protect the Dark Forces' Favorite Cash Cow, Germany, with not many any the wiser.
Ingrid Thought for the Day:
Thought for the Day:
"There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink."
Plato (427-347 ? B.C.)