Re: "German service cuts Net access" (to Santa Cruz)

[dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)]

Very little crypto relevance in the following...

lull@acm.org (John Lull) writes:

> On Sun, 28 Jan 1996 21:41 +0100 (MET), Olmur wrote:
>
> > It's illegal in Germany to publish material denying the holocaust.  In
> > the same moment this guy sent his book (?) per snail-mail from Canada
> > to Germany he commited a crime here in Germany.
>
> How pray tell is a person in Canada supposed to know that?  I (in the
> US) certainly had no idea Germany had such a law.

Ignorance of the law is not a defense. How is a reasonable person supposed
to know that it's illegal to take >$10K in cash out of the country without
some paperwork? Yet one can be jailed for that. :-)

> Are you saying that, if I ran a bookstore, and accepted international
> mail orders, I would have to screen every order to ensure I did not
> ship something offensive to the German government?  And if I did fill
> such an order, and without ever having set foot in Germany, I could be
> arrested on my next trip to Europe, extradited to Germany, and
> imprisoned for doing something that is constitutionally protected in
> the US?

I recall that the former Soviet Union had a similar "long arm" interpretation
of its laws against anti-Soviet libel: if you ran a bookstore in the U.S. that
solds anti-Soviet materials and then came to visit the U.S.S.R., you could in
principle be arrested, tried, and convicted.

> Alternatively, what if I were to post to usenet a message denying the
> Holocaust, and one person in Germany retrieved that message.  Would I
> then be subject to arrest and extradition to Germany?

Certainly, if you posted an anti-Soviet article to Usenet from the U.S., and it
reached the former Soviet Union, you would be guilty of anti-Soviet libel.

> If this is really what Germany wants, then it sounds like time to
> totally cut Germany off from the internet, simply in self
> preservation.

I'm sure this is what the German government and many German people really want.
But, would you also argue that the former Soviet Union should not have been
allowed on Internet because some of the information that would enter it via the
internet would have been illegal there? I read that Singapore is similarly
trying to restrict its citizens' access to the net. I think it would be more
honorable to provide Germans with tools to access the information they want,
even it violates their laws that we consider to be unjust.

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<a href="mailto:dlv@bwalk.dm.com">Dr. Dimitri Vulis</a>
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps