Stanton McCandlish suggested some important corrections. I changed the draft accordingly and extended the sign-on deadline with one day. Please sign on for your organisation to the following alert NOW, deadline: Tu. sept. 17th 24.00 hr. GMT. I added already some (default) signatures, let me know before the deadline when you want your signature deleted. After the deadline I'll make this alert public on Wednesday sept. 18th (again: provided I don't get serious objections!). Arie *** GLOBAL ALERT *** (not yet) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SEPT. 18, 1996 - Please redistribute this document widely with this banner intact - Redistribute only in appropriate places & only until 15 October 1996 Global Alert: German Government Pushes Blockage of Netherlands Web Sites At the behest of, and in response to legal threats from, the German government, internet providers in Germany have blocked the Dutch Web site Access For All (www.xs4all.nl), removing German users' access to the entire xs4all system. The German government demanded this action because xs4all hosts a Web "home page" with so called left-wing political content that, though fully legal in the Netherlands, is allegedly illegal in Germany. (see: http://www.anwalt.de/ictf/p960901e.htm). As a result of this action, *all* xs4all web sites, including several thousand that have nothing to do with the offending home page, are unavailable to readers in Germany. Please send a letter of protest to the German ambassador in your country, ask your foreign minister to protest officially to the German government, and distribute this alert as widely as possible online and to the press. Referring to article 19(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights, which Germany ratified in 1973, we, the undersigned organizations, consider this censorship an illegal act. Additionally, the value of attepting to ban content the German government finds offensive is highly questionable. The proper response to offensive expression is more and better expression, and prosecution of offending criminals, not censorship. As a result of the overly broad censorship measure which targets and entire Internet access provider instead of a specific user, all 3000 and more Web site hosted by xs4all are virtually inaccessable in Germany.The loss of clients who market in Germany has resulted in economic damage to xs4all. The immeasurable harm of censoring thousands of other users for the speech of one is even greater. Access for All, though it has expressed willingness to assist the Dutch police in identifying online criminals abusing the xs4all system, has a policy against censoring its clients. Mirroring this position, at least one German Net provider has responded to the government demands with skepticism, pointing out that their compliance with the censorship request may cause them to violate contracts with their own German users, and that the governments liability threats are tatamount to holding a phone company liable for what users say on the telephone. Instead of the futile act of censorship that has simply drawn increased attention to the offending material and resulting in its widespread availability on other sites throughout the world, the German government should have acted through legal channels and asked that the authorities in the Netherlands take appropriate actions. We are concerned that German internet providers have cooperated so easily with government censorship efforts. Some level of cooperation was probably assured by underhanded and rather questionable police threats of system operator liability for user content, but we must urge more resistance on that part of Net access providers to such online censorship schemes. As with libraries, there are many who would censor, but there is a responsibility on the part of providers of access to information, to work to protect that access, else libraries, and Internet service providers, lose the reason for their existence. We demand that the German government refrain from further restrictive measures and intimidation of internet providers and recognize the free, democratic, world wide communications represented by the Internet. All governments must recognize that the Internet is not a local, or even national, medium, but a global medium in which regional laws have little useful effect. "Top-down" censorship efforts not only fail to prevent the distribution of material to users in the local jurisdiction (material attacked in this manner can simply be relocated to Italy or Antigua or any other country), but constitutues a direct assault on the rights and other interests of Internet users and service providers in other jurisdictions, not subject to the censorship law in question. For press contacts, and for more information about the Internet, see homepages for the signatories to this message: DB-NL (Digital Citizens Foundation in the Netherlands) * http://www.xs4all.nl/~db.nl ALCEI - Electronic Frontiers Italy * http://www.nexus.it/alcei CITADEL-E F France *http://www.imaginet.fr/~mose/citadel CommUnity (UK) * http://www.community.org.uk Electronic Frontier Canada * http://www.efc.ca/ Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA) * http://www.eff.org Other signatures: Please send the signature of your organisation to me that I can add it to this alert. Arie Dirkzwager, Board member of DB-NL (Digital Citizens Foundation in the Netherlands).