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Internet moves toward 'virtual zoning'
(IDG) -- Gerhard Lauck is a Nazi, and publishes Nazi newspapers and a Nazi Web site. In the United States, this is not a crime. But he was arrested in Denmark five years ago and imprisoned in Germany for publishing Nazi propaganda received by Germans in the mail. He served four years. Lauck still publishes a Web site for the overseas organization of the National Socialist German Workers Party in 16 languages, including German, from his home town in Nebraska. And even if he never mails another newsletter, his site makes German judges want to put him behind bars again. German laws against Nazi propaganda apply to any Web site accessible by Germans, even if the computer sending the content is out of the country, according to a new ruling handed down Tuesday by Germany's highest court on civil affairs, the Bundesgerichtshof. "The Germans claim to have the right to outlaw anything they want," Lauck said in an interview. The German court decision against Frederick Toben, convicted of denying the historical reality of the Holocaust in publications and on the Web site of the Adelaide Institute in Australia, is only the latest in a string of rulings pitting European judges and lawmakers looking for local control over Internet content against U.S. law and custom preserving freedom of speech. Two years ago, free speech advocates might have thrown up their hands in despair and conceded that one country can control what people see on a Web site, said Jonathan Zittrain, head of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. However, technology today is moving toward the capability of 'virtual zoning,' he said. "There's a way to show people coming from one place one thing and other people other things."
The German court wants Germans to see other things. The Nazi Party is outlawed in Germany, as is Nazi propaganda and racist speech. The German military suspended a soldier in October suspected of registering an Internet domain under the name "heil-hitler.de." Yahoo! Deutschland Inc. -- Yahoo! Inc.'s German subsidiary -- has been investigated by German officials for offering copies of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" for sale. French courts want French people to see other things, too. It ruled last month that Yahoo! has three months to find a filter that prevents users in France from using links leading to Web sites selling Nazi memorabilia. The Internet -- pervasive, intrusive, at once a tool to broaden cultural awareness and an environment which homogenizes culture across borders -- is hard to tame with laws reflecting any single group's social mores or regional issues, as German officials concede. "The best chance to fight against right-wing material on the Internet is on an international level. But when I think of the U.S. or Canada, it's extremely unlikely that they'll change their laws in accordance with ours," said Hans-Gertz Lange, a spokesman for the Verfassungsschutz, Germany's Federal criminal investigative agency that prosecutes cases like the T?ben trial. "Their concept of freedom of speech is tied up with their history; our laws against incitement to racial hatred are tied up with ours," Lange said. Even as America wrestles with hate crime legislation, its advocates recognize the origins of free-speech arguments. "Laws grow out of historical context. What is appropriate in Germany may not be appropriate in the U.S.," said Mark Weitzman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center task force on hate. "I don't think one society should be able to impose its values on another." The Wiesenthal Center released a study in October indicating that the number of Web sites promoting hate doubled to 3,000 in 1999, attributing most of the growth to European extremist groups moving online. It is that movement which has drawn European courts into battle over Internet issues. "What we're seeing is two European countries with differing concepts of free speech, saying that they don't buy into the absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech that prevails in the United States. Fundamentally, this is a major culture clash," Weitzman said. The clash will resolve itself as a new consensus emerges within the Internet community to minimize the influence of hate speech online, he said. "I think that we're beginning to see a growing international voice ... these two cases are putting the Internet community on notice," he said. "I don't think we will ever create a society that is free of haters, but I think we can marginalize them." Lauck, however, believes the ruling will marginalize Germany first. "Technology is working against the global dictatorship that they're trying to impose. They can't seal off their country with a new Berlin wall," he said. The Jewish Anti Defamation League testified before Congress in 1999 that "according to some estimates, over 1,500 neo-Nazis in Germany had access to Lauck's propaganda via the 'Thule Network,'" an electronic bulletin board. "We have a five-digit daily hit count," Lauck claimed of his site. As news of the T?ben trial was publicized in Germany, Lauck's hit count grew, he said. The Nazi site administrator will make no effort to filter German viewers out, Lauck said. The site actually posts instructions on how to work around blocking and filtering software. "I suspect that they're going to come after our Web site because we're high profile and we get a lot of hits," he said. Lauck's arrest and extradition for what some European nations considered a "political crime" caused some controversy, said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center. "I think if there are very many incidents like the Lauck case, there will be international repercussions ... it is out of the question that Americans would or could extradite someone for such an offense," he said. The center also tracks Nazi and white-supremacist Web sites. "The Germans say about 80 percent of Nazi sites written in German are on servers in the U.S.," Potok said. While he noted that the SPLC doesn't "spend a lot of time tracking sites in German, for Germans," he said the ruling against T?ben will have little if any effect on the practices of Web site operators in the U.S. Still, he said "I think this is a major area of international law that has yet to be settled." There's not much the German government can do unless Lauck visits there, Lange of the Verfassungsschutz investigative agency said. The ruling may effectively help to ban high-profile American Nazis and extremist right-wing advocates from Germany, however. Richard Barrett, general counsel for the Nationalist Movement, said he recently had to cancel a trip to Germany for fear of arrest. While Barrett's site is white separatist rather than Nazi-affiliated, it gives Web space to like-minded groups. It has also grown more popular since the German case hit the news, he said. "We keep track of the number of hits. Starting three weeks ago, we started to get hundreds of thousands of hits," he said. "We've been wondering why, but I guess we know now." Describing Germany as an oppressive dictatorship, Barrett said the U.S. was the only country to have freedom of speech. "We're not just going to defy (the Germans), we're going to prevail over them," he said. With a medium which so easily crosses national boundaries as the Web, international organizations like the Council of Europe are proposing measures to standardize computer laws across borders. Human rights and information freedom organizations from several countries -- including the U.S. American Civil Liberties Union, the U.K. group Cyber-Rights and Cyber-Liberties, France's IRIS (Imaginons un r?seau Internet solidaire), and Spain's Kriptopolis have said proposals so far threaten individual liberties. The true test of free speech is toleration of opinion with which one disagrees -- so begins the refrain for First Amendment advocates. But applying American freedom of speech to a globalized world is a test without any easy answers. RELATED STORIES: Yahoo! opens legal can of worms with sale of Nazi-related items RELATED IDG.net STORIES: German court bans foreign Nazi Web sites Note: Pages will open in a new browser window
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