Finland = the new China

[Fronx]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/18/finnish_policy_censor_activist/

Finland censors anti-censorship site
Calls it child porn

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco. Published Monday 18th February 2008 22:43 GMT

Find out how your peers are dealing with Virtualization Finnish police are blocking more than 1,000 legal websites, including one belonging to a well-known internet activist, under a secretive system designed to prevent access to foreign sites that contain child pornography, according to a group that advocates for individual rights online.

Among the estimated 1,700 destinations on the secret block list is lapsiporno.info, which has vocally criticized the Finnish censorship program, according to Matti Nikki, the site's creator and a long-time activist.

Of the 700 or sites that have been tested, only two are known to contain inappropriate images of children, said Tapani Tarvainen chairman of the Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI). The remainder tend to be sites with adult-oriented themes, such as those offering legal porn, and forums for gay sex. In some cases, the sites - which include an online doll store, a Thai Windows advice forum and a computer repair service - have no visible link to porn or sex at all.

The program has its roots in a law passed in late 2006 that was narrowly drafted to filter only foreign websites that contained child porn. To critics, the inclusion of sites like Nikki's, which is located in Finland and contains no pornographic images of any kind, demonstrates the slippery slope that gets started once censorship is allowed.

What's more, the censorship system threatens sites that offer all kinds of content, including political forums blogs and message boards. That's because it requires Finnish internet service providers (ISPs) to block entire web servers, so a single user posting a single inappropriate link has the ability to get an entire service shut out. As a result, plenty of legitimate sites based in the US, Europe and elsewhere, are blocked solely because they share space with a bad actor.

"It's a bit harsh for the Finnish police to tag them as child porn, and it certainly will hurt the reputation of these businesses," Nikki wrote in an email to The Register. "To my knowledge, the censored sites haven't been notified by the police about the situation either."

Nikki fights back
Nikki has compiled a list of sites he's found to be blocked. It contains about 1,000 entries, but he says Finnish police have claimed there are about 1,700 addresses in all. Finnish officials refuse to reveal the criteria for an individual site to get added to the list. Even for those sites that learn they are being censored, there is no clear way for owners to get their site to get removed.

In 2005, Nikki attracted international attention when he analyzed the secret digital rights management rootkit that Sony BMG was installing on users' computers. More recently, he's been an outspoken critic of the Finnish government's censorship plan. Last Tuesday, the EFFI says, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) added his site to their list, but has refused to say why.

Three days later, Finnish police said they wanted to question him in connection with an investigation to determine whether he aided in the distribution of material violating sexual chastity.

"Without knowing any details, a good guess is that the police suspect that having a clickable link to a web site allegedly containing child pornographic images is equivalent to aiding the distribution of such images," the EFFI surmised in this blog post on the censoring of Nikki's site.

Officials from the NBI weren't available at the time of writing. Helsingin Sanomat reported here that agency official Lars Henriksson defended the program. He said the list includes sites with content that meets the definition of child pornography, including those with links that lead to such pages.

"This is not censorship", Henriksson told the publication.

The irony of the draconian sweep is how easy it is for the censorship to be circumvented. A simple change to the DNS setting of an operating system or router, in which a Finnish ISP's official internet protocol address is substituted with OpenDNS or another alternate provider, is all that's required to get around the block.

Not that this gives Nikki or people at the EFFI any comfort. They worry that officials are already expanding the reach of the law beyond what was contemplated when it was enacted. How long, they ask, until its used to block sites alleged to promote copyright infringement, gambling or racist views?

Also:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/02/19/0252236
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9874155-38.html?part=rss&edId=3&subj=news

 

[Princeps]

I haven't noticed anything.

 

[Julian Delphiki]

Our communications minister gave some incredibly stupid comments about this today. Mainstream media is only now picking up on this and still has lot's of their facts wrong.

OH PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

My ISP (Sonera) has told that they're gonna implement this filter (DNS filtering, totally ineffective) next month, so i will be changing ISP soon.

I haven't noticed anything.

Haven't you heard about this crap? Not all the ISP's have implemented this yet; see http://lapsiporno.info

Or http://digitoday.fi/yhteiskunta/200...uuriuutinen+levi%E4%E4+maailmalla/20085226/66 or http://www.hs.fi/politiikka/artikkeli/Lindén+Lapsiporno+ei+sananvapausasia/1135234214007 , make sure to read the discussions, thats where the actual facts can be found.

 

[Masquerouge]

All I can hope for is that in the near future we'll have political leaders who will be familiar with the internet, and such BS will stop.

 

[Peuri]

Does anyone know why they are blocking gay porn & gay rights pages? Sounds very underdeveloped of Finland.

PS. Can we get nukes next?

 

[emzie]

Oh noes, people looking for illegal stuffs will have to jump through 1 hoop. Meanwhile, Finns are protected from Windows forums.

 

[Fronx]

It's about principle, not about "getting illegal stuff".

Plus, as you can read from the articles, the cencoring ins't actually cencoring anything illegal; the cencored domains are not child porn domains (only few exceptions).

 

[amadeus]

Hasn't Finland had censorship in place for some time now? I thought they censored things to appease the USSR.

 

[dutchfire]

They're going to build a Great Wall in Lapland?

 

[Hitti-Litti]

If Sonera starts to use this, then how am I supposed to go to acceptable sites if they are blocked? I mean, Sonera is the only company that provides ADSL to my home(yes, I live in a magic forest with hobbits and leprechauns).

 

[Angst]

They're going to build a Great Wall in Lapland?

Isn't Lappland a region in either Sweden or Norway?

 

[TheLastOne36]

Isn't Lappland a region in either Sweden or Norway?

stretches from sweder, norwat, finaly, to teh sovietz

 

[Angst]

stretches from sweder, norwat, finaly, to teh sovietz

cool, in EU2 it's a region owned by Sweden

 

[TheLastOne36]

was confused with the land the lapps lived in:

isn't the area of northern finland called lapland?

 

[Angst]

Yes, but in EU2 it's a province itself, covering the Swedish part of Lappland.

Thou art correct.

 

[DNK]

Does anyone know why they are blocking gay porn & gay rights pages? Sounds very underdeveloped of Finland.

PS. Can we get nukes next?

No, sorry. What if the Russians stole them? That'd be scary... Russians with nukes. We just can't risk it.

 

[Angst]

No, sorry. What if the Russians stole them? That'd be scary... Russians with nukes. We just can't risk it.

THey do have nukes?

 

[DNK]

THey do have nukes?

Do they have nukes?

 

[Angst]

Do they have nukes?

I am pretty sure they do have nukes. The Cold War was so bloody terrible because they had nuclear power, therefore nukes. Remember Tchernobyl (sp?)

 

[DNK]

Hmmmm... but nukes are hot. That doesn't seem right...

Chernobyl wasn't in Russia. That was in Ukraine.