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Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

reuters.com

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Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#161

Post by akho »

Milner08 wrote: post #46
akho wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the German government saying: Look here, you got a bunch of criminals and terrorists (literally, with weapons) on your platform, you need to do something about it. This sounds like a police matter, and should be a question that is asked to, not by, the government. Not that any government understands that…

That is exactly what has happened? The police will be aware of this, and the government need to decide what to do.... The first step is clearly to engage with the platform. Maybe its you that doesn't understand?

The steps are to investigate the criminal / terrorist activity, identify and arrest the culprits, and reach an appropriate outcome in the justice system. Engaging the platform in so far as the platform can legally assist the investigation. Closing (or publicly threatening to close) the platform is not helpful in any way.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#162

Post by BurningPenguin »

fileeditview wrote: post #158
BurningPenguin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every legitimate protest throws those kind of people out. They don't. You may want to ask them why. Funnily enough many of those "protests" are organized by known extremists or those party members.

Is it defined by you who is allowed to participate and what makes a protest legitimate? If people there make illegal actions, the police has to intervene. That's it.

Every protest has someone organizing it. It is their job to distance themselves from certain groups and to send them off. And if those groups don't comply, the police is happy to help. But instead of doing that, they happily walk side by side with those groups and participate in protests that are organized by those.

They want to be accepted by the majority? Then they need to stop walking with literal Nazis.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#163

Post by orbifold »

fileeditview wrote: post #140
orbifold wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t have a problem with it if it was just that. Police here deserve to be stress tested and in principle you can spontaneously declare something to be an assembly by naming someone the assembly leader. The issue is their message and the right wing / nazis that they are walking among them.

It's not a problem who is walking among them or what their message is. Anyone has the right to express his opinion. I am getting really sick of hearing this argument. No there is nothing in the constitution that would forbid you to protest peacefully alongside whoever. Also the message you are allowed to voice is not defined by you or some politician. If you have a problem with some of the protestants you can voice y…

I judge them very harshly, they deserve no respect or sympathy. It should never be acceptable to walk with people that minimise the holocaust or talk openly about how they had talks with former army members of armed insurrection in their telegram channels (there are screenshots to prove that). They chose "Reichsprogrom Nacht" of all days to do a candle procession through Heidelberg for instance, with known Neo-Nazis in their ranks.

But yeah they should be free to continue to self-incriminate themselves on Telegram and elsewhere. It is not like they are some kind of sophisticated state level threat.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#164

Post by orbifold »

BurningPenguin wrote: post #154
orbifold wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to that is to counterorganise, civil disruption of their protests by other members of society, not repression by the government.

Generally yes, but once certain people get violent or disobey specific rules, it is the job of the government to stop that. Otherwise things escalate badly.

Sure but that doesn't include shutting down Telegram. It is easy enough to infiltrate those groups and keep them under surveillance. You can do very basic police work to counter act them.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#165

Post by YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #159
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We made the decision because the law is not a arbitrary thing it gets implemented because of what is written in our constitution and by law makers that we voted into place. If you want to change the law do it politically and get a majority like we did with cannabis and stop rambling about "freedoms" on the internet.

> stop rambling about "freedoms" To ramble about something means to talk about it in a confused way. If you find something specific confusing about the way the parent comment talks about "freedoms", maybe you should point that out. (Of course the parent comment doesn't talk about "freedoms" at all, confused or not.)

> Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do.

Not everybody in the world wants to be the one who decides what is extreme or mainstream.

He fears to be silenced and ostracized or that his right to free speech will be suppressed.

That all because there could be a possibility that a for-profit company gets forbidden that is not complying with the laws of the country it itself is operating in. This is rambling.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#166

Post by BurningPenguin »

orbifold wrote: post #164
BurningPenguin wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally yes, but once certain people get violent or disobey specific rules, it is the job of the government to stop that. Otherwise things escalate badly.

Sure but that doesn't include shutting down Telegram. It is easy enough to infiltrate those groups and keep them under surveillance. You can do very basic police work to counter act them.

Shutting down is the last resort. If Telegram wants to continue operation, they have to comply to the local laws.

Infiltration also isn't as easy as it sounds. They can use that as a defense. Which actually happend several years ago. They failed to get rid of the NPD, a Neo-Nazi party, because they couldn't be sure if their plans were legit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Party_of_G...

Getting a company to obey the law is probably easier.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#167

Post by hnbad »

ryanar wrote: post #38

Germany banned Wolfenstein 3D when it came out in the 90s. What happened? Wolfenstein became one of the most viral games in Germany. If people want to get Telegram in Germany, they will one way or another.

Wolfenstein became "viral" because there was no legal way to obtain a copy and peer-to-peer spread is by definition "viral". I'd wager Wolfenstein significantly underperformed both in sales and number of players compared to if it had been commercially available. Remember that this was pre-WWW, also PC gaming was much more of a technologically literate hobbyist space and copying floppies was fairly straightforward.

Most Android users probably don't sideload apps at the moment. Telegram is a vital communication tool for the Querdenker (antivax) movement as well as far-right extremist groups. Extremely motivated extremists will surely jump to another platform, but censorship is amazingly effective at hindering recruitment and keeping out the "normies".

FWIW the ban of Wolfenstein was informed by an understanding of games as pure entertainment for kids in the vein of Tetris, Pacman or Space Invaders. "We put swastikas and nazis in this video game" was a legitimately horrifying prospect at the time. If modern Wolfenstein games insisted on not modifying the releases for Germany, they would likely initially be banned but be able to overturn this ban once and for all given we now understand games as a narrative medium like film and nobody ever had to worry about removing the nazis from the Indiana Jones movies.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#168

Post by pjc50 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #143
pjc50 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organizing a crime in conjunction with other people is an offence in basically every jurisdiction, including the US.

But the mailman who carried the coordinating communications is not guilty of participating in that coordination, doesn't open and read the mail, and the postal service is not shut down when the activity is discovered. Perhaps some would say "Ah but it's possible to intercept and open someone's mail, and that's the difference!" Probably with a warrant an individual's mail can be intercepted, but if the letter inside w…

> has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code

This is a very sweeping statement that is false for lots of places and times; while Germany is at the supportive end of encryption various other EU countries have mandatory key disclosure to law enforcement. Even in the US it's illegal to make encrypted radio transmissions on certain bands.

It is a poor argument to make the it would be impossible for Germany to criminalize encrypted communication. They can do it, even if it would be ineffective and widely subverted.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#169

Post by beardedman »

foepys wrote: post #150
beardedman wrote: post #136

You've had censorship in Germany for a very long time now, but I don't think people like to think of it as censorship. You (literally) can land up in jail for verbalising certain things. IMO, the scary part is how positively people view this, like it's a feature (and then proceed to talk about the CCP or Russia like they are stuck in the mid 1500's).

> You (literally) can land up in jail for verbalising certain things. Go to the US, go to a police officer, and just tell them you want to kill the President. Watch what happens. There is no such thing as absolute free speech, even in the US.

Do not confuse threatening bodily harm to a person with free speech - they are very different.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#170

Post by pjc50 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #55
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker". It may not be the main use of telegram but if you are a member of the public only seeing these kind of stickers everywhere would make me worry as well.

What if I distributed stickers with a phone number where to call to get drugs? Would Germany ban phones? If I did it with an email address, would they ban email? :)

In the phone case, they would obviously put out a wiretap order: https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Nachrichtendiens...
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