A year in censorship

It's now been exactly one year since Matti Nikki's website lapsiporno.info was censored by the Finnish police. My post on the topic from a year ago is here. Since then, nothing has changed.

To make a long story short, Nikki's website criticizes the Finnish police's anti-child pornography measures, because they're anything but that. For this, access to his website has been blocked and remains blocked from Finnish ISPs. He is also supposedly under investigation for distributing child pornography, for the "crime" of posting the URLs of websites the police have blocked access to, which do not contain child pornography. Unsurprisingly, the criminal investigation has made zero progress, mostly because it's blatantly obvious to everyone that there's no way the case could ever stand up in court. The police aren't investigating him to prosecute him, they're investigating him to smear his name in public.

Nikki's website can be accessed via its direct URL, http://hack.fi/~muzzy/lapsiporno/, which, inexplicably, is not blocked. The site contains excellent writing on child pornography and the efforts to get it off the Internet, and contains, among other things, a charming letter from a Finnish prosecutor in which he explains that even though the police tell the media that you are a suspected child porn distributor (without an ounce of evidence) and block access to your website so that if someone types in the URL, they see an official police message saying the site they're trying to access contains child pornography (it doesn't), none of this constitutes slander or an unjust accusation, both of which are crimes in Finland.

Then again, Nikki's website isn't a crime, but it is blocked and being investigated as a crime, so it makes sense that things that are crimes are not being investigated. Right?

As befits a democracy, where political power comes from the people and belongs to the people, there is absolutely fuck all any of us, including Nikki, can do. He's comlained to the Finnish Chancellor of Justice, which is the only legal recourse he has, and nothing has happened. In my opinion, you would have to be incredibly naïve to believe anything will happen.

As the Nikki case amply demonstrates, this is a country in which citizens have absolutely no rights against the state. We're watching the police break the law by censoring Nikki's website every day, and there isn't a thing any of us can do about it.

Welcome to Finland!