Germany to build the Internet Berlin Wall | Hacker News Reader

Germany to build the Internet Berlin Wall

boingboing.net

15 pointsnoodle6 comments

Given Germany's prohibition on Nazi expression, it seems likely this will also be used, in the near future, to block white supremacists.

The issue here isn't that this law is bad in and of itself. There's no legitimate reason why child porn should be accessible. It's a crime and there is a definite victim so censorship of it is something that should happen. The trouble is, what ELSE gets censored in the future?

That is muddle headed. The crime is the sexual abuse. It is being photographed. Discovering the photographer and rescuing the children is a good deed. Hushing it up? Not so good.

I really doubt that keeping pedophiles from accessing said pictures will stop the police from prosecuting those who posted them in the first place. Your logic makes no sense. Just because you make it harder for criminals to access illegal material doesn't mean you can't go after the providers too.

Even taking into account that child abuse is as bad as child abuse is, blacklisting child abuse pictures at the ISP level is unnecessary and counter-productive:

- Experiments by civil rights activists have demonstrated that it usually only takes hours to take down a child abuse website if one alerts the hosting company.

- Owners of a child abuse website (if they haven't gone peer-to-peer yet) can check by polling their own website's availability whether they're on the federal police's radar yet.

- The blacklists themselves can be considered a "best of" of child abuse picture websites; since they need to be distributed to hundreds of ISPs, their eventual leaking seems inevitable.

What about the part where child abuse pictures are an ill-defined category? Take, for example, this comic:

<NSFW> http://pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF215-Kitty_Photographer.jpg </NSFW>

Is that child abuse (the photos the man took, not the comic itself)?

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