Decrypted German Internet Censorship List

**chris** · #1 ● 03-17-2017, 02:58 PM

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Was trolling around the DarkNet today and came across an interesting encrypted list that the German Government maintains of blocked websites in the country. Someone was able to break the apparently weak encryption they use and published the list in plain text. Of course we are on it. So I copied down the list and made it into a PDF. Here is an excerpt from the release:

Found German secret Internet censorship list as hashes and recovered >99% of the URLs.

Germany has a censorship federal agency called BPjM which maintains a secret list of about 3000 URLs. To keep the list secret it is distributed in the form of md5 or sha1 hashes as the "BPJM-Modul". They think this is safe. This leak explains in detail that it is in fact very easy to extract the hashed censorship list from home routers or child protection software and calculate the cleartext entries. It provides a first analysis of the sometimes absurd entries on such a governmental Internet censorship list.
Introduction to the BPjM

The Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons (German: "Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien" or BPjM) is an upper-level German federal agency subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. It is responsible for examining media works allegedly harmful to young people and entering these onto an official list – a process known as Indizierung (indexing) in German. The decision to index a work has a variety of legal implications. [...] Germany is the only western democracy with an organization like the BPjM. The rationales for earlier decisions to add works to the index are, in retrospect, incomprehensible reactions to moral panics.

The censorship list ("index") is split into various sublists:

Sublist A: Works that are harmful to young people
Sublist B: Works whose distribution is prohibited under the Strafgesetzbuch (German Criminal Code) (in the opinion of the BPjM)
Sublist E: Entries prior to April 1, 2003
Sublist C: All indexed virtual works harmful to young people whose distribution is prohibited under Article 4 of the Jugendmedienschutz-Staatsvertrag
Sublist D: All indexed virtual works, which potentially have content whose distribution is prohibited under the Strafgesetzbuch.

The sublists A, B and E contain about 3000 movies, 400 games, 900 printed works and 400 audio recordings. That sublists are quarterly published in the magazine "BPjM-aktuell" which can be read in any major library in Germany.

The sublists C and D were as well published in BPjS-aktuell (now BPjM-aktuell) up to edition 2003-01.
Since then the list of indexed virtual media is considered secret. As of July 2014 it contains more than 3000 URLs.