"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" ("Who watches the watchmen?") was the question asked 2,000 years ago by the Roman poet Juvenal, otherwise known for his famous "mens sana in corpore sano" ("sound mind in a sound body") and "panem et circenses" ("bread and circuses"). The question is especially relevant in light of German Federal Minister of Family Affairs Ursula von der Leyen's recent draft bill on Internet censorship as it relates to activities of the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) or German Federal Criminal Police Office, the investigative agency that discretely draws up the nation's top secret blacklists. The BKA would automatically track the IP addresses of surfers attempting to open blacklisted sites, a simple click on a link (that may never materialize) being sufficient for "initial suspicion." This lack of a governance body and accountability can have implications: the Wikileaks whistleblower site recently publicized secret blacklists in Australia, Thailand and Denmark -- countries that already established censorship based on a similar argument of protecting against child pornography -- showing a massive number of entries that have nothing at all to do with child pornography. Instead, online poker sites, YouTube links, Wikipedia entries, political discussion forums and the usual porno sites get blocked -- and the list is steadily growing.

An online public petition directed to the Bundestag that should stop the von der Leyen law has meanwhile reached over 55,000 signatures. The Bundestag's FAQ website gives the criteria for petitions:

"If a petition is supported by 50,000 or more signatures within three weeks of its issuance (in the case of a public petition, from publication on the Internet), the Petitions Committee will, as a rule, hold a public hearing where the petitioners are invited to present their case."

Franziska Heine, main spokesperson for the petition, who was interviewed on Saschalobo.com May 5, will be the one to present the case in the Bundestag. The 29-year-old, who lives in Berlin, will get inspiration from the demonstration held there mid-April against "Zensursula" (as von der Leyen and her eponymous law is knicknamed) by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). But Heine doesn't want the activism to end with the CCC, thus the reason for handing in the petition. Heine in the SaschaLobo interview:

"It's not about weird nerds and geeks being deprived of their playthings. It's about structures being put in place that deprive citizens of their basic rights, and that is not acceptable! It's not right to capitalize on certain themes without getting to the root of the problem. In a society that derives more and more of its information from the Web, we shouldn't have lists where nobody knows what's on them and why. Quite normal people moving about the Internet shouldn't fear and worry about having to stumble upon websites with stop signs."

The 50,000 signatures are only the minimum required for the Bundestag's consideration of a petition, where "as a rule" is still open to interpretation enough to leave the Bundestag a loophole. However, the more signatures, the stronger the signal the community will send politicians.

The Bundestag petition site server is currently overburdened and has a slow response rate. Refreshing the site should be avoided, mainly to allow new signatures to be added. In fact, a specially designed Mitzeichner (co-signers) Twitter site was created to show the current signature count without overburdening the government server.