Finnish censorship

[rinso]

At the moment several articles are appearing about a list of 1700 internet sites that are blocked in Finland by the NBI.
Reason for this is; they are alleged child porn sites, or contain links to child porn.
But many of those sites seem not to have illegal contents.

More info:
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Anti-I ... 5234057449
http://www.effi.org/julkaisut/tiedottee ... 12-en.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/18 ... _activist/

What really scary is, that there are suggestions to extend the censorship to other areas of unwanted activity (i.e.gambling)

[mCowboy]

welcome to the Nanny State

[ajdias]

Here's another link: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/19/0252236.shtml

Finland's EFF has information about the block list, which reportedly includes a musical instrument store, a doll store, and a site of Windows tips in Thai. Recently added to the list — which by law should contain only child pornography sites — is the text-only site of a Finnish free-speech advocate who criticizes the censorship law. Evading the ISPs' block is trivial, of course.

Cory, the issue here is children pornography, not children accessing porno; and what entitles authorities to block some sites on a seemly arbitrary basis.
I have a blog and quite often someone reaches one of my pages looking for "s3x videos with m1nors" or "v1deos of rap3s" in google (it was a lengthy discussion ). It's pretty disgusting but that also means these people are not finding it easily.

[Oombongo]

I am usually interested in R&D websites, and they are not censored so I am not worried at all.

[rinso]

@Cory. As a parent myself, I completely understand your opinion and I agree with most of it.
But the scary thing is (if you read the articles) that the decisions are made by civil servants without a proper system to correct mistakes. And as I understand it, a site can become blocked if it's on the same server as an illegal site (due to some technical stuff I don't understand).

[Jukka Aho]

More on the topic:

• CNet News: Finnish government blacklists 'free speech' site
• The Register: Finland censors anti-censorship site
• Effi: Finnish Internet censorship

(The way this is being handled now seems a slippery slope to me... There are apparently already lots of false positives on the list, the sites affected by the list don’t get informed about the situation, the list itself is secret, and those in charge of maintaining the list don’t seem to have any accountability whatsoever.)

[Karhunkoski]

and those in charge of maintaining the list don’t seem to have any accountability whatsoever.)

But isn't that just "Finland" Very few people want to take responsibility for anything? As someone commented to me recently, "Be careful at work, if you show the slightest inclination to want to take responsibility for anything, they'll start promoting you".

[sammy]

and those in charge of maintaining the list don’t seem to have any accountability whatsoever.)

But isn't that just "Finland" Very few people want to take responsibility for anything?

Well I don't know if I'm the right person to answer that...

[Karhunkoski]

Nice one sammy!

[rinso]

It's a slippery slope to say for certain but if I had to choose between tough internet porn site "police" or not... bring on the censors.

If it works for one (good) cause, it will work for many other causes too.
When you start sliding, it's no telling where you'll stop.