die tageszeitung, January 24, 2002, p. 14  (translated from German)

Closely Monitored Data
More censorship or more security? A company in Halle has invented a prize-winning filter technology that has to be installed at the provider. However, it is only meant to be activated if the customer wishes it.

Niklaus Hablützel

… By now, the provider Isis has lifted his blockade, assuming that the threat of punishment made by Jürgen Büssow is not going to stand up to any court. According to the law, blocking of web contents is only allowed if it can be realized technically and if it is not unreasonable for the company. But obvious nonsense is unreasonable.

However ridiculous the single-handed effort of the government official of Düsseldorf may seem, it still seems to be the beginning of a new discussion of technical intervention for the control of the data traffic between providers and their clients. A heated discussion about an invention that won the innovation prize of the city of Leipzig 2001 is currently going on in a forum of the Chaos Computer Club. The Nutzwerk company (www.nutzwerk.de) has developed a data filter that can give any upholder of the private sphere the creeps. Unlike the popular, but not very useful porn and ad blockers on individual PCs it has to be installed at the provider. Far below operating system level and therefore independent of it – René Holzer, CEO of Nutzwerk, explains the principle – this program checks the binary data stream that is flowing to the connected customer and makes it readable in real-time. "Even eMails", Holzer admits openly that they are readable by the human eye, "simply everything".

This method has been patented and – according to Holzer – puts everything into the shade that has been developed for the exploration of user data even in the USA. However, his motive for the programming of this super spy was not to give the provider or a government access to the data traffic of any internet user. All that Holzer wanted was to market an effective protection against computer viruses and other data not wanted by the user. To him, the only protection suitable for the layman seems to prevent such data from reaching the computer at the other end of the line. And this objective again can only be reached by analyzing the data at the provider. This is the only way to identify viruses before they can do damage.

Startled by the largely fierce protests from the Chaos Computer Club he is now even willing to provide his source code to the open source movement. However, he wants to wait until the "discussion is lead on an objective level" again. Holzer feels misunderstood – both politically, because he insists that he is strongly opposed to governmental censorship, but also in a technical sense. And he is certainly right: Among other things, his filter is so much more effective and faster than others because it does not process the entire data stream of the provider. The profile that decides about how data are passed on is associated with the IP address that the provider assigns to the customer. Holzer thinks that this characteristic technical feature prevents third persons from reading or manipulating the data stream: the software is only activated when the customer – who has adjusted it according to his wishes – logs in at the provider.

Jürgen Büssow, for example, would only be able to block access to American Nazi pages for himself and not for an entire administrative district. "Who wants something else will have to rewrite the program", says Holzer, still hoping for a lasting success of his system. His bet is not on censorship requests by politicians but on security interests of managers. According to MacAfee, out of the more or less 17 billion dollars of damage that was caused by computer viruses during the last year only 3 billions affected private end users. The main burden was on the industry and the providers.