The Dawning of Internet Censorship in Germany
netzpolitik.org
netzpolitik.org
This is a great example of demonstrating the government's real intentions. If a bunch of guys can send a few emails and take down 60 childporn sites, what are the paid government enforcement agencies doing? Evidently, it has nothing to do with child porn and everything to do with politics.
By the way, in France our 3-strikes law was found unconstitutionnal, and this law seems similarly dubious: do you guys in Germany have some institutions that check this kind of cases?
Yes, there are some checks in Germany.
First of all this law has to pass the "Bundesrat", the representation of the 16 "Bundesländer" (states of Germany).
If this council passes the law one still has the opportunity to "go to Karlsruhe", which means appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court that is located in Karlsruhe.
In the german online community this has been the hot topic of the last weeks and the german pirate party (http://piratenpartei.de/) has mainly focused on this issue .
"...without introducing a censorship architecture and circumcising constitutional freedoms."
The translation is fluent, and I shouldn't make fun of it, but that line made me laugh.
On a more salient note, it's good to see that these proposals are not proceeding without public notice. It's hard to fight the "FOR THE CHILDREN!" brigade, but fortunately the Germans are having the debate openly, paying at least lip service to constitutional process.