"According to Germany's leading tabloid paper "Bild" (Saturday edition), Federal Minister for Familiy Affairs, Claudia Nolte (Christian-Democrat), in an unprecedented decision has formally had several Web pages banned for being "X"-rated by the "Federal Office for the Evaluation of Literature Hazardous to Minors".
These are pages featured by Ernst Zuendel, a leading political revisionist located in Canada whose purportedly "Neo-Nazi" views have been the subject of much controversy in Germany.
Ms Nolte is quoted as saying: "It is not tolerable that the Internet should be an island with special privileges, on which thoughtless or unscrupulous providers may pursue their infamous activities with impunity."
This effectively forces Internet providers to restrict minors' access to said pages - a technical impossibility since most minors accessing the net are be using their parents' accounts.
No "Netwatch" or other self-censorship software will suffice to conform with this provision, as it is THE PROVIDERS, not the kids' legal guardians, who have to comply with this restriction. Following a recent decision by the State of Hamburg's Supreme Constitutional Court to the effect that service providers cannot be held responsible for possibly illegal contents of data transfers via their networks (here, AOL was accused of disseminating child pornography), this move must be regarded as a circumvention tactics to put the thumbscrews on ISPs nevertheless by invoking Minors Protection legislation instead.
(Also note that the Hamburg decision ruled that email message were protected by privacy laws as any snail mail letter - hence, providers could not be expected to monitor their contents as this would violate constitutional rights.)
This implies that German based ISPs (including AOL's and Compuserve's local services) will actually have to ban ALL GENERAL access to the Zuendel pages from their systems unless they are willing to risk running afault of the law."
What do you say to that? Just think about it and stay tuned. The titles
of the eight "offending" pamphlets can be found by checking on
the Zundelsite News Pages, both English and German. (Links are provided
for the German documents, since they are the only ones banned.)
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
(Friedrich Nietzsche)