SOPA and all that: the view from Finland

Yeah, I'm not blacked out because I'm lazy. But I'm delighted that so many websites, from Wikipedia on down, are protesting the idiotic legislation proposed in the US. US laws on copyright and the Internet make a huge difference for the rest of the world as well, especially since if the US passes a law like this, European legislators will inevitably use that as momentum to pass similar ones here, if they're not directly pressured into it by the States.

We in Finland should be especially wary, as we've had some nightmarish experiences with Internet censorship before. One of the first posts I made in this blog was a very poorly written rant on the Finnish "child pornography" censorship bill, which permitted the Finnish state police to set up a secret blacklist of foreign child pornography sites that ISPs would be voluntarily forced to block access to. Shortly after the list was launched, a Finnish website criticizing this was put on the list, in blatant violation of the law. After years in court and endless obfuscation by the Finnish police, the Finnish justice system decided that it had, in fact, been wrong to censor a Finnish page containing no child pornography under a law that allows censoring foreign-based child pornography websites. However, none of the police officers responsible could be reprimanded in any way, as they can't be expected to understand the laws they enforce. I'm not making that up.

So the previous time Finland tried a censorship blacklist, it took literally days to expand beyond its original purpose into censoring criticism of the police and government. In the same decade, in a country where smashing a disabled person's head into the wall while raping them doesn't get you a prison sentence, creating parody blogs does. Last year, the Finnish police requested a law banning "approving" discussions of child pornography, and of course, we now have Internet censorship again with the Pirate Bay ban. So in effect, Finland already has SOPA.

By the way, if you criticize any of this, the MPAA thinks you're a corporate pawn.

In the middle of all this, it would be good to remember that I'm writing this blog post on Blogger, and because of Sweden's FRA law, the Swedish military can read this as it's written, along with my personal e-mails and everything else I do online. Lately, some US jurisdictions have started shutting down cellphone services to hinder demonstrations, and similar moves are mooted in the UK.

The defining struggle of our time is between a "total state", bent on using information technology to monitor and regulate everything we do, and between a civil society that paradoxically uses that same technology to create new forms of communication that constantly elude those controls. Put simply, I believe that in the long run, our alternatives are an Orwellian surveillance state or a free information society. Will information technology be used to repress us or liberate us? That's what this is about, and it's the most important political struggle of our age.