[Nettime-bold] German Minister of the Interior announces DoS attacks against U.S. Websites

[sebastian@rolux.org]

German Minister of the Interior announces DoS attacks against U.S. Websites


[i apologize for sending a news forward, but this might be a relevant one. it's
the top news item tonight on http://spiegel.de, germany's major online news
portal. it basically says that the german state department is considering dos
attacks a legitimate weapon against foreign websites that do not comply with
german law. ironically, the justification for these phantasies of german world
governance are nazi propaganda sites hosted on foreign servers. otto schily,
minister of the interior, has explicitely mentioned spams and denial-of-service
attacks as possible means to get rid of websites that are legally out of reach.

so just imagine: one scenario would be a bunch of german internet specialists
sending out buggy ms word macro viruses to any nazi's mail address they can
find in their database, with a subject line that says "heil hitler" or "germany
loves you"... but the second scenario, which i'd consider much more likely, is
that they may not have the slightest idea about the internet (like the minister
of justice who issued a proposal last year saying everyone attepting to access
a nazi site should be automatically redirected to the official website of the
government's anti-violence campaign), but that they are really working on it.

just imagine the king of tuvalu (or, if you like, the chinese army) remotely
shutting down german internet service providers because some of their customers
were not in accordance with their own local preferences. you can bet, they would
call it the info holocaust. when it comes down to german special intenet police
vs. johnny average nazi asshole, you'd better be sure which fascist to fight.
-- what follows is a rough translation of the article. the original text is
available at http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/politik/0,1518,126921,00.html]


Hacking the Nazis

The German Minister of the Interior, Otto Schily, is considering Denial-of-
Service attacks to shut down foreign internet service providers that are hosting
nazi websites.

Schily's speaker, Dink Inger, argues that hacker attacks conducted by the
Ministry of the Interior would "not be unlawful at all". On the contrary, "these
are legitimate means to defend German law against criminals threats that are
taking advantage of the international nature of the internet." The Ministry's
decision to conduct such attacks would only depend on "the law, the effectivity
and the chance of success".

Denial-of-Service attacks could be planned and carried out by Schily's new
"Internet Task Force", which has been designed to protect "critical
infrastructure" all thoughout the country. The Task Force has been installed
shortly after German Internet facilities were heavily hit by the "Melissa" and
"Iloveyou" viruses early last year.

Interviewed by the Washington Post on December 21, 2000, Schily had already
lined out that defending Germany's Internet infrastructure would not exclude
certain aggressive tactics, even if he was aware that most of the criminalized
sites were located in the U.S. and protected by the First Amendment.

Just one week before, the German Bundesgerichtshof (then dealing with a nazi
website located in Australia) had ruled that German authorities have the full
rights to legally prosecute anti-semitic and revisionist propaganda, even if
published in a foreign country.

In a reaction to the court's ruling, John Russel, former speaker of the Justice
Department, had made clear that the United States would reject such absurd
accusations of offences against German law commited on U.S. territory. Back
then, Otto Schily commented that his means of enforcement were not limited to
the "official procedures" and that he could imagine spams or DoS-attacks.

As Alan Davidson from the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington has
stated, this would mean "to break the law of a foreign country in order to shut
down a Website that is legally operated there".

The German Internet Society (Isoc) in St. Augustin has issued similar
objections. "The Internet must be goverened in accordance to international law.
Even the prosecution of nazi propaganda doesn't justifiy such dubious operations
in a foreign country."



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