New York Times, 6.6.97, S. 1: Germany's Efforts to Police the Web Upset Business By EDMUND L. ANDREWS FRANKFURT, Germany -- With her mohawk haircut and her activism in the successor to East Germany's old Communist Party, Angela Marquardt has never worried about provoking controversy. But Friday, the 25-year-old university student will enter a Berlin courtroom to face criminal charges that she assumed were unthinkable in a democracy. The charge against her: maintaining an Internet home page that provided an electronic link to a left-wing newspaper called Radikal. The German authorities, alarmed by articles in the newspaper that offered tips on making bombs and derailing trains, said she violated government orders to block access to Radikal. Ms. Marquardt said she did nothing wrong, and that people could read the German underground publication on scores of Internet sites. "I don't see why I should remove the link from my home page," she said in an interview this week. "Whether I show it on my page or not, the link exists." Ms. Marquardt's case is not unique. German prosecutors and politicians are pushing harder than officials in other Western democracies to govern the seemingly ungovernable reaches of cyberspace. They have pursued individuals like Ms. Marquardt, they have tried to block access to other distributors of material they consider obscene, violent or a danger to society, they have assigned police who surf the Net looking for outlaw sites and they are pressing for a law that commercial online services fear could land their executives in jail. In addition to their concerns about pornography, the authorities said it was illegal to offer "youth-endangering" material that glorifies violence, promotes racial hatred or bends morals. Access to violent computer games like "Doom" is punishable. So are sites on the World Wide Web that offer swastikas and other celebrations of Hitler's Third Reich. Such symbols have been outlawed here since the end of World War II. Those efforts are now sparking protests from services that do business here, including America Online and Compuserve, which worry about being prosecuted over things they cannot control. Just last month, prosecutors in Munich indicted the head of CompuServe's German subsidiary on charges of aiding in the distribution of pornography and violent computer games. CompuServe, a unit of H&R Block Inc., had no hand in producing or promoting the material, but prosecutors charged that the company did not do enough to block Germans from reaching material that was illegal in Germany. Now, scores of other industry executives are warning that a new "multimedia" law, proposed by the center-right government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, may leave them in even greater danger of being prosecuted like CompuServe. "Would you take a job if you knew that tomorrow morning you might be arrested by the police?" asked Hermann Neus, a lobbyist in Germany for IBM, who is spearheading efforts by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to modify the proposed law. "Industry has the liberty to move to Ireland, Denmark and Holland. If Germans are not up to speed, it makes no difference to the customers." Legal experts said the situation here was just the beginning of a broader wrestling match between national governments and the nationless Internet. "The Internet created a universal jurisdiction, so that once you are on the Internet you are subject to the laws of every country in the world," said Chris Kuner, an American lawyer in Frankfurt who closely follows German cyberspace issues. "The Internet gives rise to jurisdictional problems that never happened before." Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court is now weighing the constitutionality of a year-old federal law prohibiting pornography and sexually "indecent" material in cyberspace. The law, which a lower court ruled violated the First Amendment, excludes from prosecution those who make "a reasonable, effective and appropriate" attempt to keep such material from minors. But Germany is pushing the issues further. German officials have been threatening for months to file charges against more than a dozen Internet access providers, including the German subsidiary of UUNet Technologies, because they failed to block access to a Dutch Internet site called XS4All. The Dutch server carries home pages for abut 6,000 commercial customers, one of which belongs to Radikal. UUNet is based in Virginia. In the next few weeks, Kohl's government hopes to push through a broad new multimedia law that is intended to clarify who is liable when forbidden material becomes accessible over the Internet. In an attempt to soothe online services and Internet access providers, the law exempts companies from liability if their only role was to provide a communication network for customers. But industry executives said the measure had merely heightened their unease, because it would also require that companies take all "technically feasible and reasonable" means to block access to material that violated German laws. That phrasing has drawn objections from both U.S. and German online service companies. "Obviously, public prosecutors think that it is technically feasible and reasonable to block access," said Hans-Werner Moritz, a media lawyer in Munich who represents Compuserve. "That situation will lead to a number of charges by prosecutors, which could take three to five years to be resolved." Some of the most aggressive attempts to prosecute purveyors of "verboten" material have been in Munich, in the conservative state of Bavaria, where the police have organized a small squad of officers who surf the Internet. The cybersquad is headed by Karlheinz Moewes, a burly, 30-year police veteran who gathered much of the information for the case against CompuServe. "The Internet providers have much more ability to block content like child pornography than they suggest," Moewes said in a recent interview at Munich police headquarters. Firing up one of his computers, he quickly surfed through hundreds of Internet sites that posed possible legal problems here. Not surprisingly, there was hard-core pornography. But there was much more: the Church of Euthanasia home page offering advice on committing suicide; a marijuana home page, and numerous neo-Nazi sites, most of them maintained in the United States. When the Munich police first put pressure on CompuServe in 1995, the company voluntarily blocked access to more than 200 Internet news groups. But the company later lifted that blockade, saying that many of the news groups had nothing to do with pornography and covered important issues like AIDS and breast cancer. CompuServe then offered customers free software called Cyber Patrol, which blocks their own computers from reaching pornographic sites. The software, which is available in the United States, contains a list of areas that are off-limits for children. The list can be regularly updated. But that did not satisfy the authorities, who charged that CompuServe could have blocked access to the forbidden sites. Moewes refused to comment on the CompuServe case, but he did say that giving parents "child protection" programs did not solve the problem. "Programs like Cyber Patrol are not enough, because they are only effective if people actually use them," he said. Germany's minister for science and technology, Juergen Ruettgers, who designed the proposed law, said, "It is the responsibility of the states to make clear where the boundaries of tolerance for the society lie." Now it is Ms. Marquardt, a former official in the Party for Democratic Socialism, who is the focus of what could become a test case. Whether she is found guilty or not, most experts say her case dramatically illustrates the difficulties of governing the Internet. Ms. Marquardt ran afoul of Bonn's federal criminal agency last fall, after the police ordered German Internet providers to block access to the Dutch Web site, XS4All. Founded in Amsterdam by an entrepreneur named Felipe Rodriguez, XS4All offers access to the Internet and the ability to post a personal home page for about 30 guilders, or $15.40, a month. The server now carries nearly 6,000 home pages, one of which publishes Radikal. The German authorities were incensed by what is now a well-known tract among cyberbuffs, "A Short Guide to Hindering Trains." Officials viewed it as an invitation to terrorism, and some German Internet providers made half-hearted attempts to block the site. Ms. Marquardt, however, defiantly put a link to it on her home page. Meanwhile, supporters of XS4All quickly set up scores of new ways for people to read it. They copied it onto at least 58 other Web sites. In April, after prosecutors renewed their efforts to block access, Germany's biggest academic Internet service, the Deutsche Forschungsnetz, unilaterally threw up its arms and declared the whole effort futile. Police officials have not responded to that blatant disregard of orders, but they pressed ahead with the prosecution of Ms. Marquardt. Indeed, prosecutors added yet another charge, indicting her for publishing the formal charges against her on her home page -- a violation of yet another law. Tuesday, Ms. Marquardt was awakened by Berlin police shortly before 7 a.m. and served with a search warrant. "First, they wanted to take my computer, but then they worked on it for an hour and couldn't find anything," she recounted later that day. "I told them I wanted to call my lawyer first, but they didn't let me. Instead, they called him but could not reach anyone." "Since you only have one call," she added, "they just went ahead" and searched her computer. Michael Schneider, a lawyer near Bonn who represents many German Internet access providers, said prosecutors were continuing to investigate any company refusing to block XS4All. "The XS4All case made it clear that it is not possible to block content on the Internet," Schneider said. "But that does not appear to be the view of the lawmakers." _________________________________________________________________ Related Sites Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. 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