Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 09 June, 1997

In recent stories about authorities in Germany who are in over their heads, reports are surfacing of an Internet police force infuriated by a problem it can't solve: effectively policing the Internet. In almost cartoonish ways, just when officers think they've got their foot on a users head, a similar or more troubling occurrence strikes nearby, rushing them away to another problem spot.

German newspapers are currently reporting on a trial which most Western democracies may regard with some degree of skepticism. It involves a young woman, Angela Marquardt, who has been hauled into court because her home page provided an electronic link to a leftist publication titled Radikal. The publication, unfortunately for Ms. Marquardt, contained instructions on bomb making. She ridicules the police for arresting her, however. Even if she did not show the link to Radikal on her homepage, she says, it would still exist.

In the United States, according to The New York Times, efforts have stalled in efforts to track the doings of Internet users. Other Western nations are coming to terms with the fact that they cannot "govern the ungovernable reaches of cyberspace."

Germans are seemingly concerned not only about pornography, but about what they call "youth endangering material" which gives high marks to violence, excites racial hostilities, or bends morality. Germany has just become the first nation to place the Church Scientology under national surveillance, a close watch that will include interception of Scientologists' mail, and most likely, their email.

Last month the German police indicted the German head of CompuServe, not because he was personally involved in distributing pornography but, say the investigators, because he did not do enough through his offices to stop such transmissions over CompuServe's system.

Legal experts are now admitting that a struggle has begun--"a wrestling match"--between national governments and the ungovernable Internet, where cyberspace knows no nationality.

"The Internet gives rise to jurisdictional problems that never happened before," says Chris Kuner, an American lawyer in Frankfurt. "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."

While U.S. authorities have asked that providers of erotica simply make pointed efforts to keep minors from viewing, Germany is presently attacking a host of Internet providers for such "crimes" as failing to block material from certain Internet sites.

The right-wing government of Helmut Kohl is presently fashioning a new multimedia law through which it hopes to make clear who is to blame when forbidden publications pop up on computer monitors. While the present phrasing of the law seems not to specifically indict providers that have not "adequately" policed themselves, providers are still much worried.

The new law, says one, also requires that providers take every "technically feasible and reasonable" means to disallow illegal communications. What this means, nobody is sure.