Finnish blogger in prison

Two years ago, I wrote about a Finnish blogger, Seppo Lehto, getting a two-year prison sentence. His crime was creating several blatantly fake blogs that purported to be written by Finnish civil servants. We may be in a third world country, but seriously, when you google a politician and find a ridiculously racist, infantile and insulting blog that focuses on the writer's genitalia and confesses to him being a KGB agent, really, you probably figure it's a joke.

In short, anyone with the Internet literacy of a brick understood that the fake blogs were juvenile parodies. I thought no-one took them seriously until it turned out that the Finnish police did. Lawsuits were raised, and as Hesari put it at the time, the crime was deemed "exceptionally serious" and Seppo Lehto was sentenced to two years and four months in prison for "aggravated libel". He also has to pay tens of thousands of euros of reparations.

After the sentence was passed, Seppo went on the lam. According to Aamulehti, the police finally caught him this midsummer as part of a random DUI screening. That tells you everything you need to know about the Finnish police's alacrity in policing search warrants, by the way. He's currently doing time at the Turku prison.

I just thought I should put this out there. Here we are, peacefully reading and writing our blogs, while in the country I'm writing this in, a man is going through a multi-year prison sentence for blogging.

Here's the problem: I can't accept that. At all. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone reads this blog regularly, but if you do, you may recall a couple of posts I did on rape in Finland. In this one, I related the story of a Helsinki police officer who got a two-year suspended sentence for raping a minor. He used his badge to get into her home and raped her. So he didn't go to jail at all. A lot of similarly "fun" examples here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit to a certain personal bias. I did prison time too, for not serving in the army. If I'd spent six months playing war and raped an underage girl instead, I wouldn't have.

I live in a country that puts people in jail for blogging, but not for rape. There's no way I can express how wrong that is. And the fun thing is that no-one cares. Every time there's a high-profile rape case where the guilty party gets off with practically nothing, there's a storm of public outcry, but within a few days everyone's forgotten all about it and gone back to watching The Hills or True Blood.

That's the way civilization ends: not with a bang but with indifference.