Yesterday after a press conference on the topic the a bill to police internet access was brought on its way to become law in a cabinet meeting. This is of course all discussed as measures against child porn, ignoring the infrastructure that gets established in the process and the concupiscences it will and already does generate. (Also in the news yesterday: Dieter Gorny, head of the association of the German music-industry, welcomes the bill and encourages the government to also use it to “protect copyrights”.)

Last Friday, voluntary contracts with five of the seven biggest providers were signed that addressed filtering DNS requests explicitly. The bill on the other hand is technology-neutral and talks about effective measures of filtering.

The plan is to show a stop sign once a user tries to access one of the sites that is on the secret list of the federal police. Until “privacy concerns are cleared up” the stop site will only count the visitors to collect a (preferably high) number to have an indicator of the success of this measure. Already however there is talk about storing logs and using them for prosecution “in real-time”. Clicking links might be enough to bring you in the focus of the authorities in the future. Not to speak of e.g. link-prefetching, Javascripts or Malware that generate DNS requests.

Another interesting detail of the bill is that it currently only targets ISPs with more than ten thousand users. Universities and government agencies are also excluded. This is a (futile) try to prevent leakage of the censor list by minimizing the number of people with access to it. Once we’ve got actually “effective measures” to filter leaked filter lists, I assume this will be changed to include every ISP.

Watching the press conference it became once more painfully obvious that these are people whose only contact with the internet is by way of a laser printer. Also, from where I’m standing, belittling concern about civil rights and freedom seems to become more and more universal. I think it’s going to get a lot worse, before it gets better again.