A German ISP changed their DNS to block my website
lina.sh
lina.sh
I'm confused because CUII at:
https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
says (translated):
> The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
CUII is saying that they enforce court orders. I guess that language doesn't preclude them from also blocking other sites.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250130115412/https://cuii.info... said
> The Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet (CUII) is an independent body in Germany. It was founded by German internet access providers and copyright holders to objectively examine whether the blocking of access to a given structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany is lawful. When copyright holders submit an application, a review board examines whether the relevant requirements are met. If they are, the review board then recommends a DNS-block of the structurally copyright-infringing website in question. Every recommendation of the review committee must be unanimous and only apply to clear cases of copyright infringement. The recommendation is then forwarded to the German Federal Network Agency for Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, Post and Railways (Bundesnetzagentur - BNetzA). If the examination by the BNetzA does not reveal any concerns about the DNS-block according to the provisions of the EU Net Neutrality Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2015/2120), the CUII then informs the internet access providers and the applicants accordingly. In such cases, the internet access providers participating in the CUII then block the corresponding domains of the structurally copyright-infringing website in Germany.
related post by the same author, which mentions the current version of the website: https://lina.sh/blog/cuii-gives-up
> The CUII now only coordinates blocks between ISPs after a court order. That's it. No more secret votes. No more corporate censorship. The new version of their website says: "The CUII coordinates the conduct of judicial blocking proceedings and the implementation of judicial blocking orders."
I don't get your point.
What is written on the website of some company/organization/... when writing about itself, is what the respective company/organization/... wants you to believe about it. It should be trivial for you to recognize that what this company/organization/... wants you to believe about it can be very different from what you desire to find as truth about it.
It's like if I wrote: "aleph_minus_one is the greatest human that ever lived on earth." Do you now seriously believe that just because I wrote this about myself, it must be the truth?! :-)
(Disclaimer: I have no idea who you are, but you are great nonetheless!)
So yes, they USED to just block whenever they wanted, based on "previous similar cases" but without a court order (or a pending one). They then got a lot of flak from the regulatory bodies and switched to actually only include court ordered blocks.
Still I would heavily recommend to just use a non-german DNS service.
Fast forward to today, Americans are pushing you for self censorship through force and denial(if you don’t speak in line with the admin, you will have hard time in your US public sector job or if you want to travel to US) and Europeans find all kind of other ways.
Tough new world order. I used to be advocating for resolution through legal/political means, but now I'm inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control. Nobody wants loose ends. Everyone is terrified of some group of people will do something to them, freedom is out of fashion and those claiming otherwise want freedom for themselves only. The guy who says want to make humans interplanetary species is posing with people detained for traveling on the planet without permission. Just forget about it.
So this website itself is about censorship, therefore people interested in this shouldn’t be using websites. New tools are needed, the mainstream will be controlled the way the local hegemony sees it fit.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks. The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
Taking a step back, I support the ideals (the good ones at least) of what I’d perceived that our country was founded on. I also support the individual people in our police and military, but not the fascist orders that they’re having to fulfill. I think the majority of these people joined to uphold law and order or to protect all people in-general, I don’t think they want to be doing these things some of them are being ordered to do, and I think that continuing to do bad things is how fascists are able to take hold.
This is a predicament, because it’s like you’re driving the bus and a fascist jumps into your lap with a gun to your head and takes the wheel, while he has others put guns to the head of your family and others on the bus. No one asked for this, and I still feel like there are many that believe that there is nothing we can do and that it will take care of itself. But the gerrymandering law that just passed in Texas, on top of everything else that was already in place, is another warning that this won’t go away on its own.
I get what you’re saying about sending people to space, but I think that being able to get off our big rock if we can do so without destroying other life and other places in the universe is worth time and effort. Even natives that lived with the land and life that existed had to move sometimes, life and all that exists physically that has space is to some degree nomadic.
I hope that someday we will put this genie back in the bottle and return to the previous normal.
Check out "Ordinary Men" by Christopher R. Browning.
Also check out this one, written to counter Ordinary Men.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_Willing_Executioner...
It's not well-regarded, but I think that one thing the book tries to bring to light is the context and valence of values of the times, and the political furor of that era which directly contributed to the hatred and violence. I'm not sure that it's fair to say that they were just following orders without looking at the broader social context that people were living in up to the point that those orders were given.
I think that his concept of "eliminationist racism" is somewhat accurate, as I have known race-based supremacists in real life, and have had them protest/counter-protest public events I have been involved with providing security for.
I don't support racial supremacy or hatred in any way, in case that was ambiguous or unclear from context.
What delectable naivete.
Besides copyright, especially among Americans, I find that its completely O.K. to censor content it is bad for business. A major one is censorship in order to be advertisement friendly but anything flies, even the guy owns the thing and can do whatever he pleases is good enough for many(slightly controversial).
At the time, Germany had a law censoring insulting comments about foreign heads of state, but that only applied to living ones (and maybe only those in office at the time?) That law was repealed in 2018.
The videos remained blocked in Turkey, but on account of a specific law banning criticism of Ataturk, not copyright.
It's not what's good for you, it's what's good for them.
Would you ban all propaganda? Russian propaganda? Propaganda from countries engaged in illegal wars? How many social media or news sites survive? Heck, how many sites that allow comments and user interaction survive?
Yours is the "think of the children" argument, makes you feel warm and fuzzy when it aligns with your interests but you won't have a leg to stand on by the time it's used against you. Banning is just sweeping some of the trash under the carpet. The ones wielding the ban hammer don't care that most of the trash is still out in the open (social media?), they just need to open the door to arbitrary banning. The ones applauding the ban hammer are lacking the same critical thing that would otherwise handle propaganda and misinformation very well: education.
If you want your child to not smoke you don't just hide the cigarette pack on a higher shelf, you teach them what smoking is and does.
Meanwhile all the RT type crap is flooding social media under thousands of names. But that's fine as long as enough rubes are tricked into thinking banning one site did anything to solve the propaganda issue.
The problem is just getting bigger because 1) we aren't actually doing anything else (real) about it and 2) we even actively allow propaganda and misinformation on so many other channels it's laughable.
I said above, the people doing the banning just need a vehicle to carry their interests and justify their banning powers. Since they don't care about the problem itself, they don't care about any of the real measures that could tackle it. They pick the only one which gives them what they really want: power to arbitrarily control information. Russia is a great excuse today (and honestly, almost throughout their history) but it will be used against you tomorrow.
You don't even have to dig too far to see the exact same type of propaganda freely spread on X or Facebook, where the people actually are. RT is happily active there. Far right Musk is there. Can you even pretend that banning the rt.com site in Germany does anything towards the goal of curbing disinformation?
What's "freedom" mean if not the right to read any publication you want, including (especially!*) media from hostile foreign countries? It's cynical to attack core civil liberties and say that you are doing so in defense of liberty.
*This is the most obvious thing in the world, IMHO, if you look at the general category, and ask yourself what you think about it when the actors are switched around. If China bans its citizens from reading the New York Times (it does), is that a human rights violation—or is it a simple exercise of sovereignty? When North Korea sends people into labor camps for possessing South Korean television shows (it does), is there a colorable case that *their* national security justifies that? Or is that totally out of the question?
One'd have to twist themselves into pretzels to plead exceptionalism for their own country doing anything of this category.
(There's a further subtext that anyone on HN knows how to trivially circumvent such blocks, so, these rules inherently can never apply to HN commenters, ourselves—it's always other people, we'd wish to apply these rules to).
You don't want to live in America because it's dystopic and collapsing? Strange. Strange that there's a correlation between countries that hold your opinions and dystopia and collapse. One might even be lead to think that principles held by dystopic countries that collapse might be bad principles to build a country on. But those who promoter those principles told me to reject the evidence of my eyes and ears.
It's been a longstanding part of the fascist playbook to turn the norms of liberalism against itself, advocating for "free speech" when it helps actively amplify their message to audiences, and having no hesitation to abandon those purported principles once in power and able to censor opponents. Poof, there goes your free speech.
Principle agnostic approaches to freedom of expression lead to the collapse of democracies. Happened in Hungary, almost happened in Poland, and it's unfolding in the U.S. The point isn't that these idea's "win" in a marketplace of ideas but that they mobilize violent anti-democratic capacity.
No, it's a false binary choice presented by you in which the only outcomes are "dealing with it" (severe overreach) or the destruction of the country.
> just
So... you do both?
lol the US has had that door removed
But CUII is formed by a private oligopoly, with anonymous judges, implementing vague rules, trying to keep secret even what they block. All while limiting what the vast majority of Germans (who don’t know what DNS is) can access on the internet. IMO that’s the issue.
It is a tool that entrenches current powers that be, system wise. Who decides what the "common" good is? the one in power.
It also hides societal problems and signals that could be used for policymaking.
The acceptance of censorship honestly scares me, and i grew up on stories of oppressive communist regime - full of censorship, secret police etc.
and frankly, commercial censorship might be even worse - it is a "for profit" enterprise, common good be damned.
and one last thing - even if you fully trust your current government, you're just one elections away from something vastly different. They will have access to the same powers that you've granted them(indirectly, by voting).
Everyone believes in censorship for the common good. People don't agree what should be censored for the common good.
the issue with it isn't just in itself, but the fact that there's no way to make it without abuse.
The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse strike again!
If you believe nothing should be censored, then you believe child porn shouldn't be censored, so please either square that circle, or weaken the argument to "I believe this thing shouldn't be censored"
But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
On the other topic, I for one think that censorship of AI generated content and fake news, as well as AI generated ordering of results should be censored. But it's not that easy, and implementing that is an even bigger can of worms.
> But then, you have to define these things. E.g.: freedom of person "A" to kill person "B" infringes on person "B" freedom of come and go and not be killed (by "A" or anyone else) ... so what is freedom. "Common good" is even more complicated ... who should defined it ? And how ?
even worse - how do you make sure the definition of such terms stays up to date with changing times?
It's tough to imagine what this might look like. I suspect it's too late.
Device attestation is becoming more prevalent, and required for increasingly more functionality. Passkeys are breathing down our necks.
Alternate protocols can only exist if the corporate and governmental powers look the other way. We have Signal and VPNs and BitTorrent and tor, but for how long?
And moreover, does it even matter what protocols we want to use, if most of us use devices that are fully controlled by the tech giants who want to do the censorship?
Ideally you would have good government involvement to enforce traffic neutrality, but that's out the door. I'm sure this has been talked to death but ground level P2P infrastructure is what I would be rooting for.
To me, those 2 sentences contradict each other. Doing it through copyright rights, and doing it for money and business sound pretty much the same to me. But you're saying that traditionally one wasn't considered censorship, but the other was considered censorship.
Censorship is state/company mandated retraction or blockage of certain information. Copyright is state/company mandated blocking of certain forms of expression.
Copyright permits you to publish any idea you so desire, only that you don't plagiarize someone else while doing so. (Which is always possible, as the fair-use doctrine is a thing)
Copyright law is absolutely a justification of and mechanism for censorship.
It may arguably be socially beneficial censorship, but then that's what is claimed by proponents of every basis and means of censorship.
Removal of content due to copyrights is censorship, you are being denied to spread or consume certain content. It's not different than defining that some content is protected with "national security" or however else you define it and then prevent the spread and consumption of it. Same thing, different excuse.
You can use placeholders to see it more clearly, i.e. "This content is X therefore in accordance to the law needs to be removed, failure to do so may lead to prosecution and penalties of Y"
You can replace X with anything, including "copyrighted material", "support for Hamas terrorism", "hate speech", "defamation of our glorious leader","communist propaganda", "capitalist propaganda", "self harm".
If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
I think censorship is generally already considered to be any suppression of speech/communication/information. There are forms of censorship that many consider to be fine/justified, like taking down libel or removing inappropriate language in songs played on the radio, but it'd still conventionally be considered "censored".
The threat of 10 years in prison under the DMCA for providing information that lets people jailbreak/repair/reverse-engineer their own devices definitely fits the bill of censorship to me.
> If I steal an object, and the government takes that object away from me, would you call that government action "theft"?
If you see some state/company secret that you weren't supposed to, and the government prevents you communicating about it, I'd say that's a form of censorship. I don't think it can be analogized to stealing an object in a meaningful way.
Indeed, but that's not really what we are talking about with piracy, is it? State secrets and copyrighted material are clearly different things.
I don't want to go into the copyright discussion. The only thing I will tell you is this and I won't follow up: Piracy is not theft, it's something else and removal of content to elevate the claimed harm is still censorship. Other censorship types all claim greater good too, the "good guys" in this digital world are not just the copyright lawyers.
I am not saying this from anti-copyright perspective, I'm not anti-copyright although I have issues with it and IMHO needs a reform.
Good faith dialogue is not possible under these self-imposed constraints.
Then I think it's on you to provide an alternative definition to the one in the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
I'm very curious as to what you think the word means.
What a fun way to completely invalidate anyone who doesn't agree with you that "freedom is out of fashion"!
If a low six figure number of people in a handful of states had voted last fall, none of the lawlessness that we’ve seen this year would have happened. The people telling you that voting is useless are enjoying the fruits of suckers believing them.
The key part being "in a handful of states". There are many states in the country in which your vote is all but meaningless at the federal level. The Electoral College + relentless Gerrymandering that has been done over the past decades ensures that only a small fraction of eligible voters can cast meaningful votes. Makes it much easier to target and propagadandize those smaller groups. We saw it play out with Cambridge Analytica, but there hasn't been another "scandal" of that sort because it's just established practice now. Everyone has their hand in the pot doing the same thing, it's all above belt.
You should still vote, because you can enact change at the local + state levels, but the levers of federal power have been taken from the people.
Second, while some states may be unlikely to change their choice of president or senator, the local level matters quite a lot AND that’s where electoral reform will happen. If you don’t like the two party status quo, if you don’t like the electoral college, giving up on voting ensures defeat whereas supporting things like ranked-choice voting or the The National Popular Vote reform.
See? Same facts, but culminating in a call to action based on the premise that is affirmative of the value of democracy. If there was one person who mobilized this way for every ten who gave up in resignation it would be done already. But the battle against hedonic skepticism is hard.
That also happens to be what the people in power would like you to believe.
The current US administration even called out the EU countries for excessive censorship so they have nothing to do with this.
Why can't people stay on topic without bringing Trump in the discussion every 5 minutes?
The issue is that they're not commonly used, and even if that changes, the ISPs can roll out harder-to-bypass censorship methods like SNI inspection or IP blocks.
You can't win the war against corporate censorship and malicious anti-freedom politicians through purely technical means. But you can sure make it much harder for them.
Oh but they can, we are suffering this in Spain every weekend the football league plays.
Tons of Cloudflare IPs sent to a blackhole regardless of how many other non relevant websites are behind.
(I'm not sure why I replied here. I guess I'm saying that establishing some kind of mesh network protocol between all cellphones would be a great addition to those other protocols you mentioned.)
DNSSEC gives you the ability to verify the DNS response. It doesn’t protect against a straight up packet sniffer or ISP tampering, it just allows you to detect that it has happened.
DoT/DoH are better, they will guarantee you receive the response the resolver wanted you to. And this will prevent ISP-level blocks. But the government can just pressure public resolvers to enact the changes at the public resolver level (as they are now doing in certain European countries).
You can use your own recursive, and this will actually circumvent most censorship (but not hijacking).
Hijacking is actually quite rare. ISPs are usually implementing the blocks at their resolver (or the government is mandating that public resolvers do). To actually block things more predictably, SNI is already very prevalent and generally a better ROI (because you need to have a packet sniffer to do either).
Of course you will need to configure your DNS server/client to do local validation for this, and at most it'll prevent you from falling for scams or other domain foolery.
The parent comment is also correct that the best DNSSEC can do for you, in the case where you're not relying on an upstream DNS server for resolution (in which case your ISP can invisibly defeat DNSSEC) is to tell you that a name has been censored.
And, of course, only a tiny fraction of zones on the Internet are signed, and most of them are irrelevant; the signature rate in the Tranco Top 1000 (which includes most popular names in European areas where DNSSEC is enabled by default and security-theatrically keyed by registrars) is below 10%.
DNS-over-HTTPS, on the other hand, does decisively solve this problem --- it allows you to delegate requests to an off-network resolver your ISP doesn't control, and, unlike with DNSSEC, the channel between you and that resolver is end-to-end secure. It also doesn't require anybody to sign their zone, and has never blown up and taken a huge popular site off the Internet for hours at a time, like DNSSEC has.
Whatever else DNSSEC is, it isn't really a solution for the censorship problem.
For everything else, there's I2P and Tor.
An even easier start, just set up unfiltered encrypted DNS on your devices. E.g. Njalla DNS or Mullvad DNS. Or get a good VPN such as Mullvad.
At the same time, keep voting for privacy. And send letters to your politicians!
This is plain false: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_commision
The project especially lists the problems of TLS. TLS is one of the most understood, tested, and well-defined protocols that can be abstracted away in implementation level. Nothing also prevents forcing TLS 1.3 which removes most of the described other problems.
This especially sounds odd:
> Questionable practical benefits over DoH
But DoH brings the full TLS stack and also the HTTP stack as well? At the same time the project complains about increased attack surface in DoT, but DoH just extends it even more.
If I also look the DoH list, there is
> Requires TCP
But just few lines befeore, they say that DoH supports HTTP/3 which is UDP.
E.g. Android has supported it 3 years already:
https://security.googleblog.com/2022/07/dns-over-http3-in-an...
and there is also 9.9.9.10, which does not perform any blocking (if it does, then no one has noticed that, which is unlikely)
Are they using nsd or bind or … did they write their own?
I did not go though the details of the proposed Swiss law to be honest so it might be obvious why they are doing that but still why Germany instead of some other place (like Mullvad being in Sweden) ?
Hence, I think Proton's move is really about reducing costs, with the potential Swiss law as an excuse.
And it sounds like blackmail: "if you don't do what we ask, we leave the country". Seems like more and more companies are doing that. Interesting to use blackmail while defending freedom, if you ask me.
- create a vanity TLD with high renewal fees
- register a bunch of sites that are mirrors of already seized domains
- mention them in enough places they get noticed
- ???
- profit
Even if they were actually seized, do you think if the police seize a rental car they'll be paying the rental fee until they give it back?
Also, blocking websites typically doesn't involve ICANN, the infringing website still owns the domain. They just order ISPs in the country to lie on some DNS queries, which is the reason why such blocks are so easy to work around.
They also mention Movistar, O2, and Vodafone. A systematic violation of the internet's integrity, carried out on the scale of an entire so-called "free" EU(!) country. It's a disaster.
Wait, is that why yesterday internet was so janky? Encountered multiple websites that seemed offline when visited from my home (Spain) Vodafone connection, but all my remote servers could still access them. In my decade+ of living here, never heard of them doing a "Ah today it's Saturday, lets block Cloudflare" thing until this very moment. Have any resources (Spanish or English) where I can read more about this? Fucking ridiculous if this is true.
https://www.eleconomista.es/tecnologia/noticias/13287968/03/...
https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...
Can you lock millions of users out of Internet? If that's not elite in 2025, who is?
Pedro Sanchez forced a public investment (€1134 billion) into that company using the SEPI so he can control Telefonica. Then he changed Telefonica president with a socialist pawn, inserted many socialist "elite" into the company, and as a cherry on top, he embedded Huawei inside Telefonica core systems.
Spain concludes purchase of 10% stake in Telefonica https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/spain-concludes-purcha...
Listen, kids, the higher you get into politics, the faster the textbooks (Marx, Smith, and antything in between) get tossed out of a window and drugs, prostitutes and hard power it's what matters.
Better if you don't know how actual politics work, because it that would be pure Realpolitiks. Imagine an 1984 and a Brave New World merded and psychos on top keeping the illusion because of raw power. You have that today.
The closest against to that would be the EFF, Richard Stallman, and hardcore groups and humanists working maybe for pride, but helping the rest of the society as the main social law (Golden Rule).
But we are not ready. We have a 'hardware' from Neolitics and a 'software' from the Space Era... no wonder the are wars and hardcore collisions between ideologies...
Even better, do this resolution over Tor.
Doing that would bypass any state level stupidity, inflicted by an oligopoly, state actors, or similar.
But now, I'm seriously considering something better than that.
Surprisingly, thepiratebay.org is available for me though without issues. My previous ISPs here (Movistar, Orange, Jazztel) were all blocking thepiratebay.org
Seems to be pretty hit/miss what exact domains various ISPs block here. I would have imagined the police/courts serve like a centralized .txt file (simplified) the ISPs just fetch once a day or whatever, but seems to be way less organized than that, for better or worse.
“Your internet provider can’t block or throttle websites. The open web stays open.” Open Internet (Net Neutrality) Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 Official text on EUR-Lex
It's not the government directly, but what is called in German "Flucht ins Privatrecht" [escape into private law], meaning that the government "outsources" such activities to private organizations that are only very indirectly charged by the government (implying that you cannot use public law to sue the government, but you have to sue the respective organization indirectly. Also, since the relationship between the government and the respective organization is very indirect, the politicians can claim that they are not responsible for the organization's wrongdoings - something that is often not easy to disproof).
From https://cuii.info/en/about-us/
The CUII was founded by Internet access providers and rightholders and coordinates the implementation of court blocking procedures and the enforcement of court blocking orders.
>A rights holder represented in the CUII can find copyright infringements and then file a lawsuit with the court for the implementation of a DNS block. If the court decides that a DNS block is lawful, this block is implemented by the Internet access providers organized in the CUII. The prerequisites for a blocking claim against the Internet access provider pursuant to § 8 DDG are met, - if a rights holder can prove his copyright, - his works are published on the Internet without his consent, - he has no other way of remedying the infringement, - if the blocking is reasonable and proportionate.
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Digitales/Sch...
rt.com is banned within the EU (and YouTube), not just Germany. It's literally a propaganda outlet of the Russian government, hardly banned lightly, or merely because of dissenting political opinions. Unsurprisingly, Moscow took that ban quite personal. Russia apologists are literally sitting in the German parliament right now. So much for censoring opposing political opinions.
Bit of a reach claiming Germany isn't part of the general internet isn't it?
Why in heaven's name would anyone think that censorship is NOT super heavy-handed in Germany?
Does Germany have a recent or historical track record of EVER being a liberal-minded place?
There is no such thing as "understandable" when it comes to censorship, especially when it comes to Nazi imagery, and especially in Germany.
If there's actually one place where it needs to be remembered, it's absolutely there.
In many cases, even investigative journalists cannot obtain details about governance processes and decisions made behind closed doors. The government often cites strict data protection rules and uses them as a shield against disclosure.
Another example: In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of events, especially since body cameras are very rare in germany.
At first sight, I don't see how the FOIA is much different to the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (freedom of information law). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsfreiheitsgesetz
Isn't the FOIA also applied on the federal level?
> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement
I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.
Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.
Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.
On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.
Also you say that my information about filming law enforcement is misleading, but then you make a legal analysis and conclude that even when you consider all these facts, you can still be charged for illegally obtained evidence. For me, what you describe is very much the same as it is not allowed to film law enforcement by de facto.
Yes, law enforcement officers should be allowed to have e.g. confidential conversations with each other. Just like you do (or should have) chatting with your work colleagues.
> so I guess you are against body cameras then.
I am conflicted, because I don't want to be filmed during police interactions, either. It really depends on the legal setup. If they are mandatory, encrypted, only readable with a court orders, always on, not fed into the general surveillance stream (AI shit, face recognition), reliable and tamper proof, I am in favor of them, I guess. That is, if they are useful to hold officers accountable, as well. Pretty utopic, tho.
However, regarding the officers privacy they are fundamentally different than a right to film law enforcement without cause, in any "public" situation.
> For me, what you describe is very much the same as it is not allowed to film law enforcement by de facto.
Yes, but not because they are law enforcement. You can also be charged for illegally filming anyone else.
Eg. dash cams as used around the world are also not legal in Germany. They have to be constructed to loop a short time interval and only retain the recording in case of an accident. You can't continuously record traffic or public life in Germany.
Personally, I think it's quite awesome you got legal leverage against someone filming, or surveilling you against your will.
Once again someone spreading Russian FUD.
So let me flip the question: if a certain thing is illegal in a jurisdiction, but hosted outside, is it justified to block access to the hosting provider (notably, including Cloudflare and other giants)?
The RT ban is not about what RT publishes, you are free to publish their arguments more or less verbatim on your own site without getting sanctioned in Europe (which indeed some people do). The RT ban is about RT being a state owned propaganda network owned by the government thats waging an active war against Europe.
And ... ?
It's pure hypocrisy coupled with conformity - or rather virtue signalling. Send junk weapons to Ukraine to showcase that you do support the cause, meanwhile keep buying gas the same time go after their propaganda because that looks nice.
I used to be a hardline freedom of information defender, but we must face the fact that humanity has become way too good at manufactoring opinions and even facts. We're exposed to this threat at all levels, from your local company invading your feed with hidden ads in legitimate tiktok content to nation states influencing your political worldview.
Considering yourself immune to this manipulation is as naive as thinking you don't need vaccines - depressingly, we've far beyond the point where individual protection is enough.
In your country if say some public TV would publish hard core porn mid day for children to see, would there be consequences? like fines and license removal? I am sure in civilized countries that TV station will be punished.
Now imagine you have a Ruzzian TV station publishing hard core porn for children to see, how to you punsish them without paid trolls claiming censorship ? Because this si what happens, in Romania Romanian TV station need to respect the Romanian laws , liek for example pay fines and retract any falsehoods and mistakes, but Ruzzians can publish fake documents and videos and if we want them to respect the laws of our countries we it is censorship... blocking faked documents is bad, blocking boobs is good in the land of the free
rt hasn't done this and there are concrete laws against doing this, if rt violated them, they would/should fined/suspended, it's really that simple, do you have any real examples of illegal things they've carried out?
and if you're implying that extrajudicial measures are the only effective method to deal w/ situations like these, then there's an issue w/ the laws
just because censorship is carried out against a cause you don't like, doesn't make it justified, since it's very likely to be used in less benevolent ways in the future
Setting limits on what content can be shown at what times isn’t censorship because you’re not actually censoring content. What you’re doing is setting rules about scheduling content.
The whole idea of supressing stupidity in a democracy leads to some sort of elitist society.
At the end, this political system is about supporting current power who settled by force (and to whom you have to pay a tax to not be sent into physical jail, and all your belongings taken).
Remember that at the beginning, these nice people are actually people who killed to be in place, and collected a lot of power and money, and that are now defending their position.
Kingdoms, then Dictatorship were too unstable, and this gave birth to Democracy, still with the same elites.
In some way, it is a softer continuation of conquest-coercion dressed as consent.
The newest generations use propaganda to settle; the approach changes, but the goal is ultimately the same.
Except, in the case of RT, it was not justified in an abstract way at all. Consistently "reporting" on stories counter-indicated by all available evidence.
To put it another way, if a judge can imprison a murderer for life as justified by the motive of reducing murders, what's stopping them from imprisoning everyone with no justification at all? Well, in practice the evidence required is quite a hurdle to this.
If you're not arguing that RT is innocent of what it has been accused, then you're arguing against the concept of punitive action outright.
Plenty of people have never seen moon hoax theorists' propaganda. They imagine if they see it, they'll quickly see through it for its absurdity. But they're often wrong. Moon hoax theorist's propaganda is actually much better than you think. They can point out lots of "inconsistencies", which do have an explanation, but aren't immediately obvious at all. You see they have experience meeting people like you, but you don't have experience meeting people like them.
I used moon hoaxers as an example because their sophisticated propaganda actually have been exposed and explained a few times, although it still isn't common knowledge why e.g. it seems the exact same rock is right behind an astronaut in two different photos. But that isn't nearly as true for suppressed ideologies. You haven't heard their arguments.
Can you give a concrete example? (Somehow I cannot recall ever seeing one proactively volunteered, in years of people denigrating RT on the Internet.)
But if you applied it consistently, you'd have to admit that Germany, the US, and many other Western countries also engage in full-blown hybrid warfare, against their own populations.
Just because two things superficially share some traits doesn't mean they are equivalent, at all. "Full-blown warfare against their own populations" is a bit dramatic, don't you think? As a German, I can tell you, while the government doesn't much act to my benefit, I am not exactly at war with them either. Intelligence, military and police don't have the competence or power, either. Most importantly, like in many proper democracies, there is a plurality of opinions and oversight in parliament, which prevents this sort of thing at scale. "Full-blown warfare" would imply a grand conspiracy, that's simply not factual.
Apart from the UK, Hungary and Poland, I think that's true for most western countries. The US is a bit exceptional, of course, since... well, I don't know what the fuck they are smoking there.
Propaganda usually isn't banned, except in specific cases (defamation, hate speech, etc...). But AFAIK, RT is not special in that regard, it is just the kind of content one would expect from a website openly affiliated with Russian authorities.
I think the current shift in acceptance of blocking social media for children is a start and allows us to consider it’s positive and negative effects.
There are people who see that as positive, because are used to be extremely careful and conscious of their words. But is a very thin line, where one word can obliterate your life as you know it.
This sparked a discussion about how to handle hate spech, as for regular people being called a dick does not result in a 06:00 am. police raid with six officers.
In the aftermath, a mural in a left wing culture center has been painted over multiple times with the tweet and a call for his resignation [1].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
[2] https://images.welt.de/67dd7b08559c903aae8287ac/12efd9779a84...
There are literally thousands of cases constantly of different severity, but freedom looks different to me. https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/habeck-beleidigu...
The good solution would be the educate the population about critical thinking, and to use their brain when they see information.
If you just censor things, you hide the real problems, and end up with dumb people without critical judgment (or no access to information).
It’s very easy to convince anyone to support your cause. Just tell them they are the real victims, that they have been deprived of their rightful privilege, and that it is someone else’s fault. Give them undue credit, take away their inconvenient responsibilities. I promise you, they will have zero motivation to uncover your lies.
We have a collective responsibility to protect the truth - the actual, messy, complicated, real-life truth.
The decision to classify something as propaganda should never be the role of a government, much less blocking it.
But that's something that's close to impossible for continental European cultures to ever understand, at a gut level.
The Russian propaganda spends a lot of resources on reinforcing high-minded ideals that provide a scaffolding for the intellectual types to climb on. The suckers and idiots fall for the more odious stuff.
For that matter, in most cases where RT has been linked to me, I couldn't see any clear way that the story advanced Russian interests, except perhaps by trying to paint the USA as full of internal social and cultural conflicts. But, frankly, American media does a pretty good job of that, too. (And many of those media outlets have also grossly misrepresented many events relevant to those conflicts — including ones where I know very well that they were misrepresented because I witnessed them first-hand. For example, I watched the Rittenhouse trial live-streamed, and then read media coverage describing something barely recognizable as what I just saw.)
(Besides, it's not like they're trying to hide that "rt" stands for Russia Today.)
It’s incredibly valuable to understand how the enemy thinks.
And it happened in Bavaria, not the biggest fans of the Green party, so it‘s a little bit strange that the state attorney went with a raid.
> In 1964, The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Sánchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." ... On a 6–3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the code was granted as a "special and unique case", and was described by The New York Times at the time as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[63] The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[62] The Pawnbroker was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. ...
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ix309/e... .
Honestly, wartime foreign media blocking is the only justified censorship type IMHO. Even then I would say that should be accessible with a delay. Why? Because media is is part of the tools in the war, up until the last day before the invasion Moscow officials on Twitter were mocking USA and other western leaders warning that Russia has troops build up and the invasion was imminent. The traditional Russian media was also writing articles about this. This was putting political pressure on the Western leaders, portraying them as warmongers reducing their credibility etc. Then suddenly one night Putin had 55min speech on why it was the West was the actual invaders and started the invasion. To this day, the Russian propaganda holds strong and awful lot of people are convinced that it is Russia who is facing invasion and is fighting bravely against the aggressors. Including the US administration since a few months.
On the other hand, complete permanent blocking also undermines populations assessment of the reality. As it turned out, the West wasn't also entirely truthful on the progress of the war and the effectiveness of the sanctions.
I don't know maybe we should have safeguards instead of censorship.
DNS are precisely a mechanism to find websites based on names, and a list of blocked websites would serve essentially as a DNS, so it's clearly circumventing the original purpose of the blocklist, asking for a list of the blocked websites is an oxymoron, publishing a website that displays that is an oxymoron, and the block of such a website is sensible.
>the “demagogue” who allows free expression is more of a tyrant than a state who blocks wrongthink
Okay
You can prevent organizations whose aim is to destroy democracy by exercising some restrictions on democracy without completely dismantling free speech and democracy.
just as for example you may jail someone and completely restrict their freedom in order to protect others, without completely dismantling democracy
(I'm sure there's a more sophisticated way to refer to this fallacy, but my point stands.)
So it appears to me there are still elephants around
Maybe we haven't observed Nazism rise again in Germany because the policies against Nazi expression, first implemented by the Allied occupying forces immediately after WWII, worked so well.
Communism did not work because it was not communist enough, now democracy is not working because it's not democratic enough. Democracy is the golden calf of westerners. I truly believe that voting rights are hurting more a society than drugs and alcohol.
They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age, but that doesn’t mean it’s not reasonable or important. Blocking propaganda posing as “news” is a stopgap measure, but we can’t do nothing if we want democracy to work.
What does "accurate media" mean?
The fact is, there strictly isn't and strictly never was any such thing.
In fact, it is absolutely impossible to attain something like this.
The moment something gets transcribed, it ceases to be objective and therefore, there never isnt any such thing as "accurate" news.
Any student of history learns this in their first semester.
> They are struggling to figure out how to do this in the Information Age
LOL, it was far, far worse before the information age.
True, there was far fewer "official" versions of what actually goes on in the world, but it doesn't mean they were in any way accurate or any less manipulative.
All it takes to check that is to hop from one so-called "free country" to another an compare two mainstream newspapers describing the same event.
The only way you can get a bit close to the actual truth of what's happening is by reading all the opinions, especially the diametrically opposed ones and try to form your own.
"Objective truth is unattainable, so we shouldn't even try" is overly pessimistic and does not reflect reality. Opinions are not facts, and the truth is not an opinion. The truth is often complicated, and a healthy media landscape contains all the relevant perspectives, but none should get away with misrepresenting the facts. You are saying that truth does not exist, while certain organizations and actors are actively doing their best to get away with lying to your face.
It has nothing to do with an "official" narrative - there is none. It is objective truth that RT is a state organization that exists in order to manipulate and lie to Western audiences.
That has never happened with newspapers. Today's many people entire window to reality is through the internet and like it or not, people believe what's popular or if not, can believe an opinion is popular if it's widespread online.
It's very easy to create racial tensions for example that way, as was done by the russians
Don't project American politics to the concept of democracy. It is not the poster child, because it is not a good implementation. Nor is the decline of the US inevitable. Lots of democracies are not going through that, but watch in horror as plutocrats and fascists undermine the country, and they take steps to avoid the same fate, which is the very reason for banning things like RT.