Finnish government blacklists 'free speech' site
A recent incident in which a Finnish free speech activist was censored by his government highlights the dangers of secret blacklists of supposedly illegal Web sites.
The spat started when programmer Matti Nikki began to research which Web sites were secretly blocked by Finnish Internet providers based on a list compiled by the government. Although the secret blacklist was supposed to be reserved for overseas child pornography, Nikki discovered that, at least in his view, the majority of Web sites blocked were perfectly legal.
And what happened when Nikki published his findings on its Lapsiporno.info site? You guessed it: Embarrassed government officials put his expose on their blacklist as well.
Sites on the heretofore secret blacklist, as compiled by Nikki, include ones devoted to same-sex erotica and computer-generated erotica (which, at least in the U.S., cannot be classified as illegal child pornography). And the blacklist he posted has been aggressively mirrored, including on docs.google.com, posing a serious challenge to any police agency intent on censoring it.
Nikki now says that he may be under investigation by the police for publishing what was supposed to be the secret blacklist. He wrote on Friday:
The police has finally asked me to arrange time for an interrogation. The request came from the violence crime unit, which also deals with sex crimes. I haven't yet gotten confirmation, but apparently they'll want to investigate me about aiding the distribution of child porn. Since there's now officially a police investigation, I won't be commenting much more about it until I've discussed the situation with a lawyer.
By the way, Nikki is the same fellow -- who goes by the nickname "Muzzy" -- who helped to analyze the Sony XCP rootkit in 2005.
In the words of Electronic Frontier Finland:
Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) demands the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) of Finland to explain why it has censored a net site that criticises Internet censorship... "If the site really had some illegal content, wouldn't the correct solution be to take the site down and take the site owner to the court? The site is located on a Finnish server and the name of the site owner appears visibly on the root page of the site."
A report on the YLE.fi news site says that Finland's National Bureau of Investigation began compiling its secret list last fall, and now has approximately 1,700 sites on it.
The United States had its own close encounter with a secret blacklist of ostensible porn sites in the form of a Pennsylvania statute that coerced Internet providers into blocking access to certain Web sites the government didn't like. In 2004, a federal judge ruled the law was unconstitutional, noting that "there is an abundance of evidence that implementation of the Act has resulted in massive suppression of speech protected by the First Amendment."
Even private blacklists, which you might expect to be more rigorous than governmental efforts, have similar problems. I co-authored an article over a decade ago that described how software filters such SurfWatch, CyberPatrol, NetNanny, and CyberSitter quietly blocked women's organizations, gun rights groups, environmental groups, gay resources, and so on.
After a decade or more of this, it's clear that the underlying problem is straightforward: Secret blacklists, especially those created by unaccountable bureaucrats, are prone to unwarranted expansion and abuse. Unfortunately, Finland has yet to figure this out.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
level, where governments are curtailing views on subjects it deems
taboo! Mirror sites are the only way to handle this!
- drawings and paintings (which effectively means Munch's "Puberty" is child porn since the model was under 18)
- text
- clothed minors in "suggestive" poses (might apply to online clothes catalogs)
- 18+ models which "appear" younger - typically with teeth braces, ponytails, small breasts...
I assume the Finnish authorities apply the same standards.
However, the presence of these filters raises some interesting questions. For instance since the filter is supposed to stop access to child porn, does that mean if the filter does not stop content that the content is not child porn? (Answer: no, because the filter is only updated by reported sites - and people who surf for child porn are unlikely to report the sites to the police...)
Also back in the late 1990s when you had the first "scare" and people got filter software like CyberNanny etc., it was revealed some of them filtered in stange and mysterious ways: Since the companies often were run by very conservative people, libaral sites like those of the ACLU and even the Democratic party were filtered... so the private alternatives aren't any better.
But of course this "undisclosed sites" filtering is very suspicious.
Perhaps people would wake up if someone hacked DNS to send other popular addresses to stop.chello.se or one of the equivalents...
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/finlanddiary/
I will try to keep it short here:
To become a politician in the big three parties, one signs agreement to follow the party lines.
Ever since 1600's, Finland has de facto been part of Sweden. They sent the people they did not want to be there, here. They took power and still have.
There has been huge censorship in the matter of language politics for years now.
As in former communist east Europe, people have to study Swedish (for them, it was Russian, which is a big language with exemplary literature) - and nobody would like to. So to be a politician, one agrees to this. Simply put, only the corrupt and the stupid want to go to politics in Finland.
What has happened, Finland has taken the bad sides of Swedish (or German, Dutch) socialdemocracy but not the good. The state health care is the worst of all surveyed by OECD, has the biggest difference between the poor and the rich. The social offices often do take away the children to institutions for no reason, but do not give the money as in other countries, for parents to take care of them.
Obviously all this idiocracy costs millions and millions to the economy but criticism is nowhere to be found in the media, mostly the people working there/owning the media have ties to the big three parties so critisizing is not really allowed.
This is a new development that someone opposing child pornography (who explains in Finnish in his pages that he has sent adresses of child porn sites to the police, who chose to do nothing about the children being raped) who has nothing to do with what I explained above, would have to go to the police to explain his actions. Though he has nothing to worry about since he got into Cnet and The register - the police are not stupid, but usually they just do not care. Someone probably ordered them to accuse him so they did. But they care about PR so he's safe. And if not, he can always emigrate, IT pros are needed round the world and get better pay in most countries, compared to Finland.
The ministers, former minister Huovinen and recent one Linden are the ones to blame for this new development. Apparently this blocking was copied from the other Nordic countries, they copy the bad things, not the good things.
- We got answer from the minister
- by ajtaka February 20, 2008 6:30 AM PST
- Well today finnish telecommunications minister Suvi Linden, who was responsible for making this law, commented the matter. Basic message was guite rude, (my own interpretation).
- Reply to this comment
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- former government made the law
- by hoohessu February 20, 2008 8:47 AM PST
- This government is responsible.
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(6 Comments)-We are protecting our children and dealing with serious crimes, so freedom of speech is not concerned in these matters. Shut f*** up.
free quote translation from her comments:
"In no case can i accept, that child porn distrubution is discussed as testing the limits of freedom of the speech. We are dealing with a serious crime and stand towards it must be as strict, as when concerning distrubution of same material in printed form."
Ministers adviser commented that she is aware that lapsiporno.info does not contain childporn. That should tell you at what level finnish information politics crawls.
Must of the stuff on list is that us or eu servers. could not NBI just send mail to their collegues at FBI and europol. They can use e-mail, I think.
news concerning these matters (in finnish, sorry)
http://www.tietokone.fi/uutta/uutinen.asp?news_id=32871&tyyppi=1
http://www.digitoday.fi/yhteiskunta/2008/02/20/Suvi+Lind%E9n+kummeksuu+lapsipornokeskustelun+s%E4vy%E4/20085242/66?rss=6
Obviously. And the minister's comment is best described as insane. She has all the people at her disposal to tell her how the things are like - also, when the police accuses someone, they do not much take stupidity into consideration when telling the sentence (and this is Finland, whereas they do not decide it, the court usually follows their "recommendation") - so there is no possibility she tells stuff only because she is stupid.
The law, however, was made by the former government. Susanna Huovinen was most responsible.
"could not NBI just send mail to their collegues at FBI and europol."
Also the local police often (or never) does nothing at all about known pedophiles who like being near schools.
http://www.google.fi/search?hl=fi&q=pedofiili+puustinen&meta=
In Finnish.
(Also about the censorship, Finns should read through sfnet.keskustelu.kielipolitiikka, usenet seems to be the only (somewhat) popular place in the Finnish net that is not censored nowadays, to learn more about their country and how the censorship works - even in this new event, Matti Nikki, who has been openly AGAINST child porn, some of the same "rules" apply - government tells the journalists what to think and tell, if I were him, I would have been out of the country for days now - I am also a coward and would not have dared to oppose the government in the first place by making such a page for free speech - in some small town he might well be in real danger as he has been told by some newspapers to be spreading child porn.)