Please forward: Contact: XS4ALL Internet BV (http://www.xs4all.nl) Postbus 1848 1000BV Amsterdam Fax: +31-20-6274498 Email: felipe@xs4all.nl * * * P R E S S R E L E A S E * * * GERMANY CENSORS DUTCH WEBSITE WWW.XS4ALL.NL, WITH 3100 WEBPAGES German internetproviders, joined in the Internet Content Taskforce (ICTF), started censoring the Dutch website www.xs4all.nl, containing 3100 personal and commercial homepages. This act of censorship is caused by the webpage of a magazine that is banned in Germany, Radikal (http://www.xs4all.nl/ ~tank/radikal/). A German prosecutor sent the following message to the ICTF (http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm): "Under the following addresses in Internet: http://www.serve.com/spg/154/ http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal//154/ and using the link on page http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/angela1/radilink.htm one can call up the entire edition of the pamphlet entitled radikal Nr. 154". Parts of this pamphlet justify preliminary suspicion of promoting a terrorist organization under ' 129a, Par.3 of the German Criminal Code, public condoning of criminal activities penalizable under ' 140 no.2 of the German Criminal Code and preliminary suspicion of inciting to criminal activity under ' 130a Par.1 of the German Criminal Code. The Public Prosecutor General at the Federal Court of Justice has therefore initiated a criminal investigatory procedure against the parties disseminating this pamphlet. You are herewith informed that you may possibly make yourself subject to criminal prosecution for aiding and abetting criminal activities if you continue to allow these pages to be called up via your access points and network crosspoints" Providers in Germany are already blocking packets to and from the host www.xs4all.nl. The 3100 websites on this server include the Kurdistan Information Network (http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/kurdish/htdocs/), the very popular Internet Charts (http://www.xs4all.nl/~jojo/) and the world famous Chip Directory (http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/). XS4ALL has not received any request from the German Government regarding the homepage of Radikal. Without any prior contact the German prosecutor decided that the XS4ALL website needs to be blocked for German Internet Users. XS4ALL is awaiting legal advice, and will investigate if legal procedures against the German government are possible. Censorship on Internet usually has the opposite effect. Internetusers consider it a sport to publish censored materials. Many users have already published the Radikal website on other Internet hosts. Here are some of the URL's: http://burn.ucsd.edu/%7Eats/RADIKAL/ http://www.jca.or.jp/~taratta/mirror/radikal/ http://www.serve.com/~spg/ http://huizen.dds.nl/~radikal http://www.canucksoup.net/radikal/index.html http://www.ecn.org/radikal http://www.well.com/~declan/mirrors/ http://www.connix.com/~harry/radikal/index.htm http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/radikal/index.htm Xs4all Internet will rotate the IP-numbering of the website www.xs4all.nl to ensure that it's 3100 userpages will all remain available for any internet-user. <end> -- Felipe Rodriquez - XS4ALL Internet - finger felipe@xs4all.nl for http://xs4all.nl/~felipe/ - Managing Director - pub pgp-key 1024/A07C02F9 pgp Key fingerprint = 32 36 C3 D9 02 42 79 C6 D1 9F 63 EB A7 30 8B 1A