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What a glorious day! First a Swedish court convicts Pirate Bay owners, then German’s family minister Ursula von der Leyen persuades ISPs to block child pornography websites. Now all we have to do is outlaw violence and theft and world peace is at hand!

Oh, wait…

The whole thing would be a good laugh if it wasn’t so frightening. I’m not gonna comment on the Pirate Bay ruling, there is plenty of press coverage on that as it is, and it’s the blockage of web sites containing child pornography that really worries me. Not because I endorse it (far from it) but because it is not merely a futile move but a dangerous one at that.

Here is how it is supposed to work: Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (aka the BKA) creates a list of all web sites containing child pornography and supposedly updates it on a daily basis (that alone gives rise to plenty of questions). That list is then forwarded to the ISPs who block all access to those sites.

First of all: it’s not gonna work. Ever. There’s VPN, there’s Tor, there’s proxies… but this is what you get when politicians make decisions about things they don’t understand. We were all very happy to hear that Germany’s Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble finally realized that the internet isn’t really just a modern telephone switchboard. Even he has his moments.
And even if it did work it wouldn’t change a damn thing. The children were already abused. The damage has been done. You are fiddling with symptoms. It’s populism, and nothing but populism. All it will achieve is force pedophiles deeper underground, aggravating the problem if anything. You can close your eyes all you want, it’s not gonna make the issue go away. If history has taught us one thing it is that people who desire forbidden things have always found ways to get it. It takes a lot of willful ignorance not to see this.

In and by itself this may not seem all that bad. But you have to see this in context: a while ago a German court approved of a house search of a blogger who linked to a site that in turn linked to another site which was on the Danish child pornography blacklist. Add the fact that “child pornography” is a delightfully fuzzy term to begin with and you find yourself on a very slippery slope to censorship.

This isn’t China. Yet. But we get closer to the edge every day and when you look at the big picture it gets really scary. Censorship is unacceptable, whatever form it may take. Wehret den Anfängen!