Andreas Fink <af...@list.fink.org> wrote: > One point to discuss is however that the judge says its impossible to > take the site down because its hosted in USA. This is ridiculous > argument to me. They have agreements with USA to follow up on crime > (Rechtshilfeverfahren). It might be a lot of paperwork and it might be > boring and time consuming, but is that OUR problem if their agreements > with USA are slow and difficult?
Actually the judge claims that it is impossible to use a Rechtshilfeverfahren because the site's content is (in his professional opinion) legal under US law. It only has been decided to be illegal under Swiss law. (It is clearly his personal opinion that this is a shortcoming of US law.) > No its not. Secondly, apparently they know very well who owns that > website and who has put it up as it happened before. The easiest > would be to take that guy to take it down himself. But that has not > even been attempted it seems. Actually, this has been attempted (the story has been going on for quite some time). The persons in charge of the sites have reacted by moving them to US based hosting. It appears that these are people who willingly accept the toughest penalty available under Swiss law (prison) rather than comply. It is not possible to (legally) "take that guy to take it down himself." > To me it sounds like the judge has no experience in the internet and > the police often refers to some "training session" where the police > guys get told how to use tools like "whois". Those training sessions > don't make police officers experts in the internet. I completely agree. > Now there's only one way to tackle this problem. WE, as experts in the > field, have to get involved. We must teach them, we must help > politicians take the right decision. Otherwise we will be put into the > line of fire and we can only loose. Yes, absolutely. Are you volunteering to work on this? > >> there are open points, > >> how to finance the equipment. > > > > *If* that court order turns ends up being binding, my understanding is > > that the equipment will have to be financed just like all other > > equipment that is required for operating an ISP in accordance with > > the needs of the customers and the requirements of the law. > > I agree if this is in the law that everyone has to do it that will > apply to everyone. > > If a court order however picks a few ISP's only and orders it to > them, If I've counted correctly, the order of Dec 19, 2008, was addressed to 178 companies. That's IMO more than "a few ISPs only". > then we should be able to reclaim the costs as its not required by > everyone and those ISP's are totally uninvolved. Why would Swisscom > and Sunrise not be forced to do this? The (in the judge's opinion) "leading" ISPs were already compelled to block the sites by an earlier court order. This is just a "mop up" operation to also address the other ISPs. I'm sure that any and all omissions of ISPs (i.e. ISPs not addressed by either court order) are unintentional. > > This implies IMO that ISPs should avoid IP-based blocking. I > > would suggest to configure, in the nameservers which you make > > available to your customers, false authoritative DNS responses for any > > domains that you're required to block. Point them to a page which > > instructs visitors to direct any enquiries regarding the reasons > > for the block to the court which ordered the block, quoting the case > > number. > > What about an ISP who doesn't run his own DNS servers and leaves that > to the customers? I think that in that kind of situation, complying with the order might easily turn out to be more expensive than the maximum fine for non-compliance. I would suggest to get advice from a lawyer before taking any decision. > > Of course this is easy to circumvent for any knowledgable person, > > but it fulfils the requirement, and it's cheap and relatively > > transparent. > > And ridiculous too. Yes, absolutely. Like the order is totally ridiculous too: Ordering a politically-motivated website to be blocked will, if anything, only have the effect of increasing the number of people who read its contents and wonder if maybe there might be some truth to the matter. > >> Is the commanding Court legitimated to force all swiss ISP to > >> follow this order ? > > > > This is unclear to me as well. > > This is very important to know Is it important enough to you that you would be willing to fund a lawyer or team of lawyers to research this question? > > Another question is this: What happens when one of those domain > > names expires and someone else registers it and uses it for some quite > > honorable purpose? That (now-suspended) court order does not appear > > to foresee any way in which the censorship order could be challenged > > at a later time on the grounds that the censorship demand no longer > > has any legal basis. > > Blocking a domain name is not blocking the page. Sure, but note that that particular court order is based on domain names, not URIs. (I'm not sure that that judge even understands the difference.) > think of > > www.hotmail.com/mybadguyshomepage/blabla.html ? IMO it's important to avoid making technical investments that support this kind of more fine-grained blocking (without being explicitly ordered to do so), so that if/when a court order comes which demands that kind of thing, it will be possible to truthfully argue in opposition that doing so would be unreasonably expensive and/or intrusive. > To summarize: we MUST react or we might let further such cases come in > daily. I would suggest to not take legal or public action right now (it's not like a lot can be done right now, since the deadline for opposing that order has long passed), but rather prepare so that we will be able to react quickly and decisively, in a coordinated manner, if/when a second case comes -- even if the next order also comes at a very inconvenient time like over Christmas. BTW, back in August last year I communicated with a journalist who cares about this kind of issue, and got the feedback that the situation would become newsworthy if there was "an outcry among ISPs". Greetings, Norbert -- Swiss Internet User Group (SIUG) -- http://siug.ch/ _______________________________________________ swinog mailing list swinog@lists.swinog.ch http://lists.swinog.ch/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/swinog
