Berlin – Five internet service providers agreed Friday in a
pact with German Family Affairs Minister Ursula von der Leyen to
obstruct access to sexual images of children.

German federal police are to compile daily surveys of child
pornography on the internet and pass on to the companies a list of up
to 1,000 websites worldwide which show images that would normally be
judged indecent in Germany.

Users who try to enter the websites from Germany will instead see
a red “stop” sign on the screen. The online companies expect to have
the blocking software operating within six months.

Officials said Germany was falling into line with Britain, the
United States, South Korea, the Scandinavian nations and others which
already routinely block access to child-sex websites.

The move aims to disrupt the trade in sexually explicit child
images and reduce pressure on children to pose for the photographs,
and is expected to block 300,000 to 400,000 attempts by Germans per
day to enter such websites.

Von der Leyen said there had been fierce opposition, but the five
heads of the companies had made an executive decision to end access
to “appalling” images that include videos of children being raped.

The five providers, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone/Arcor, Hanse Net,
Kabel Deutschland and Telefonica O2, provide 75 per cent of German
web access. Three other providers refused to join the initiative, on
the grounds that it was not prescribed under German law.

Among critics were the Chaos Computer Club, a Hamburg association
of people who explore loopholes in web security. “It will be very
easy to evade this filter,” said a club spokesman, Matthias Mehldau.

Other critics who gathered in Berlin claimed the move was a first
step to political censorship on the web. But the move has been
generally welcomed in the German media.

The previous day, German police detailed how they kept one online
community under surveillance for a full year and identified more than
9,000 computer users in 91 nations who had downloaded child-sex
images. Their names had been passed to police abroad.

About 1,000 of the users were in Germany, and so far 500 computers
had been seized in raids on homes and offices. Police spokesman Horst
Haug said in Stuttgart online communities would not be blocked by
filtering, so police surveillance of such groups would continue.
(dpa)