After seeing Swedish voters send the Pirate Party to the European Parliament, the German branch of the group has now gotten a seat in the lower house of that nation's parliament, the Bundestag. But the seat didn't come about through an electoral triumph; instead a member of the Social Democrats, Jörg Trauss, changed allegiances, claiming his decision was driven by his former party's support for a mandatory Internet filtering scheme. But the situation is complicated by the fact that the filtering would target child porn, and Trauss is under investigation for possession of that material (he claims it was for investigative purposes).
The legislation in question would implement a scheme that's somewhat similar to the one under consideration in Australia. The system would rely on a blacklist of sites, maintained by the German Federal police force, the Bundeskriminalamt. Access to blacklisted sites would trigger the ISP to send the user to a warning page, indicating that the site contains illegal child porn. Users will, apparently, still have the option of clicking through.
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