GERMANY: German internet users hit by racist spam

GERMANY: German internet users hit by racist spam

Right-wing extremists target German internet users with racist spam

Taipei Times
Friday, June 11, 2004

German Internet users were hit with an unprecedented flood of racist e-mails, much of it sent from a bogus address named after Germany's most prominent news magazine, according to media reports.

The propaganda targeting ethnics Turks and promoting far-right parties filled thousands of e-mailboxes with extremist "spam" far different from the usual onslaught hawking sexual aids and pornography.

Using taglines such as "What Germany needs are German children" and "Asylum-seeker tortures animals to death", many of the e-mails carried the apparently stolen sender line "Der Spiegel" or "Spiegel Online" after the German newsweekly and its Web service, internet site Heise Online said.

Spiegel Online itself reported that the deluge marked the first time that right-wing extremists were spamming "systematically" to reach a broad audience.

There are hundreds of racist and neo-Nazi sites on the Web, some of them in German, but most use servers abroad to circumvent the country's strict hate speech laws.

Experts cited by Spiegel Online said tracking down the people behind the current campaign would be difficult. 

Date Posted: 6/11/2004