The accusation weighs heavily in criminal law: dissemination of illegal material that depicts the sexual abuse of children. When the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) sends out such a warning as an interface for combating crime, the affected Internet service providers are alarmed. This is what happened to the host Flokinet when an urgent message arrived from the responsible department. This was linked to a request to immediately delete criminal content on its systems. Two web addresses were attached to the letter.
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The addresses in question were links to an Invidious instance that ran under the provider’s domain. Invidious simply acts as an alternative, privacy-friendly front-end for YouTube. This means that the service does not host the videos itself, but rather forwards the requests to the video platform.
Behind the first link was a harmless documentary clip showing the composer Hans Zimmer working on a slap bass solo. The second resulted in a music recording by the opera singer Plácido Domingo. Both videos were miles away from criminal liability. In addition, at the time of the BKA report, the affected web service had already been offline for six months due to technical problems.
Automated recording instead of individual case checking
The incident highlights the investigators’ checking mechanisms. After Flokinet immediately informed the BKA that the content was neither criminal nor present on its servers, there was initially no reaction. It was only after an inquiry from Netzpolitik.org that the matter began to move.
A BKA spokesman admitted to Netzpolitik that the allegations were based on automated processes. In investigations involving huge amounts of data, links would be collected automatically and forwarded unchecked as a deletion request. Links “to non-criminal content could also have been passed on”.
In the course of these mass proceedings, the BKA no longer investigates in individual cases whether the linked content is actually illegal. Reason: The mass of digital evidence overwhelms the manual capacity of prosecutors.
Transferring work to providers
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It was only four days after the first report that the BKA withdrew the deletion request as irrelevant. A bitter aftertaste remains for providers. The practice of automatically sending unchecked lists to hosters shifts the obligation for legal assessment and responsibility to private companies. This is particularly risky here because knowing and possessing abusive material can result in criminal prosecution.
In addition, according to Flokinet, this system creates an economic imbalance in the IT market. Large corporations could absorb the flood of automated government inquiries with expensive AI moderation systems and their own legal departments. Smaller, independent providers did not have these resources. Their existence would be threatened by incorrect mass reminders and the associated liability risk, which would lead to unhealthy market concentration in the long term.
(vbr)
