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."
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* XS4ALL
* Radikal magazine on XS4ALL
* Angela Marquardt's home page
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
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