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.

The madness of the copyright industry

Earlier this week, Dutch anti-piracy organization BREIN won a lawsuit against Usenet provider news-service.com, forcing them to shut down their Usenet service.

TorrentFreak: Major Usenet Provider Shuts Down Following Court Order

News-Service.com, one of the leading Usenet providers with many prominent resellers, has terminated its services with immediate effect. The shutdown is the direct and unavoidable outcome of a two-year battle with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, which was eventually decided against the Usenet provider. News-Service announced that it will appeal the decision “out of principle” as it threatens the entire 30-year-old Usenet community.

However, it's the reasoning behind this decision that should alarm everyone:

The verdict of the Amsterdam Court is very similar to the one that decimated BitTorrent site Mininova two years ago. It requires NSE to finding a way to identify and delete all copyrighted files from its servers, which is practically impossible.

Aside from threatening many other Usenet providers, a similar judgement would also mean the end of file-hosting sites such as Megaupload, and other cloud storage services including Dropbox. All these services remove copyrighted files when they are asked to, but policing their own servers proactively may prove to be impossible.

BREIN is nevertheless delighted with the verdict of the court. “It is a breakthrough step to further dismantle the availability of illegal content on Usenet,” director Tim Kuik said previously.

It wouldn’t be a surprise if BREIN now waves this verdict in the face of other Usenet providers, in the hope of shutting them down. Using this same tactic BREIN has already managed to pull hundreds of (small) torrent sites offline in the Netherlands.

So, if service providers like news-service.com can't ensure that all illegal content on their servers will be deleted, they have to shut down. This is simply insane. Try applying this logic to other service providers. Can, for instance, a motel "find a way to identify and prevent all illegal activity" on its premises? Can an airline guarantee none of the people or things it moves will be used in the commission of some crime, or indeed that no-one on board is a drug mule, or carrying a pirated CD? If not, should they be shut down? By this logic, yes.

More decisions like this will simply mean that more and more Internet traffic is going to be conducted through darknets and other practically invisible connections that are impossible to police or monitor. In short, they're driving the Internet underground. At best, all this kind of bludgeoning legislation will accomplish is driving legitimate service providers out of business and replacing them with a black market. That isn't in anyone's interest. At the same time, our freedom to use the Internet to interact with other people and express ourselves is being severely curtailed, all in the name of the supposedly lost sales of a few giant multi-national corporations.

These cases very nicely define whose interests the justice system is looking out for.

Wireless panic

I'd write about the moral panic taking over Britain's pundits, but I don't have to, because the Economist already did, brilliantly.



What I will make a note of, however, is the disturbing notion that public disorder gives Western countries an excuse to crack down on social networks and mobile communications. British PM David Cameron called for stopping "suspected rioters spreading online messages". As Canada's CBC News put it in a very disjointed article:

When social media helped protesters organize and overthrow corrupt regimes in the Arab world earlier this year, while also providing citizen journalism when mainstream media was shut out, it was lauded as a tool of democracy.



However, when the same methods are used in a scenario like Britain, they are seen as disturbing, says Megan Boler, a media studies professor in Toronto.

More to the point, when social media are used for dissent in the West, we want to censor them, and worse. In an astonishing decision, two UK men were given four-year prison terms for inciting violence via the social media, even though it couldn't actually be proved that anything they posted had had any effect on anyone (CNN).



Social media censorship is already upon us, however. Remember a while back when I wrote about San Francisco's BART police shooting a man? They recently did it again, and when people gathered to protest, BART shut down cell phone service at their stations.



So when the Egyptian government, or the Iranians, censor Twitter to stop popular protests against the regime, we abhor it as horrible censorship and a human rights violation. When California or the UK does it, we, um.



Although to be fair, this double standard is a bit more complicated than that. After all, when Iran blocks Internet use, they're mostly doing it using technology we sold them.



Having said that, it's all still a little ironic.

Banning fictional child pornography is wrong

I'll let the Ottawa Citizen introduce the subject:

Ottawa Citizen: Crimes of imagination

Canada has charged an American and is threatening him with at least a year in jail because he came over the border in 2010 with comics on his laptop, comics the customs officer decided were child pornography. If he's convicted, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of a year for importing the material. This case and others like it demonstrate the flaws in Canada's law.

According to the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, the comics were in the "manga" style that originated in Japan (Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are examples of manga comics. Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF says he believes the comics in this case include images of stick figures in sexual positions).

The Canadian law criminalizes fictional child pornography, by which I mean pornographic material like drawings or text that features children, but that no real children were abused in the making of. I'll let the Citizen finish:

But Canada's current law goes beyond pornography that causes harm to children. It also makes some works of the imagination - stories and drawings - illegal if they depict people under the age of 18 in sexual situations. Many classic works of art might meet that definition, and the law does allow for a defence on the grounds of artistic merit. This puts the courts in the bizarre position of determining what is a work of art. Citizens cannot hope to know in advance what the law really forbids, and whether the judge will share their opinion of what is art. Policing the way you express yourself on a piece of paper or on your laptop comes awfully close to policing your thoughts.

Judges are not meant to be arbiters of taste; they are meant to balance rights in a free society. Imaginary people do not have rights.

Similar laws are in the works in Finland as well, where it will join other highly questionable laws that already make even the definition of child pornography arbitrary. In fact, Finnish courts are already not only determining what constitutes art, but also whether parody is succesful, because that is the determining criterion to whether a parody constitutes an IP violation. So in Finland, courts determining what is art won't be anything new.

If you think they're exaggerating about policing thoughts, by the way, Finland's state police have already applied for a law criminalizing talking about having sex with children in an approving manner. I so wish I was making that up.

**

There are those who say that protecting children from sexual abuse is so important that we must do anything to stop it. Whatever one may think of this, laws against fictional child pornography fail on that count.

Daily Mail: Charity's anger at proposal to make child porn legal 'to protect children from abusers'

The research found that child sex crimes fell when child pornography was more easily accessible.

The discovery tallies with similar studies in Denmark and Japan, where child pornography is not illegal, that found incidences of child sex abuse were lower in those countries.

The conclusion of the new study is that ‘artificially-produced’ child pornography should be made available to prevent real children being abused.

Pornography was strictly prohibited in the Czech Republic between 1948 and 1989.

The ban was lifted with the country's transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offence.

Diamond and his team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes as it moved from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to the material being decriminalised.

Results from the Czech Republic showed that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalisation and wide availability of pornography.

Most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan.

They also found that the number of cases of indecent exposure and other, less serious, sex crimes fell dramatically in the wake of pornography becoming more readily available.

The researchers say: ‘As with adult pornography appearing to substitute for sexual aggression everywhere it has been investigated, we believe the availability of child porn does similarly.’

So not only are no children harmed in the making of fictional child pornography, its availability seems to decrease sex crimes against children. In general, pornography decreases sex crime, so this finding makes sense. I know that this cuts no ice with determined anti-pornography crusaders, who replace scientific data with claims that porn makes you gay, but the reality is that fictional child pornography, if anything, seems to make children more safe.

However, that's a terrible argument for not banning it. The Ottawa Citizen put it quite nicely when they said:

There's no point in having a right to free speech if we make exceptions for everything that people find distasteful or offensive.

In fact, that's the kind of free speech we have in Finland; our constitution guarantees Finnish citizens freedom of expression, except when constrained by law. In other words, our constitution gives us a right to say things that we're not banned from saying. Some right! The only place I can think of that doesn't allow its citizens to do things that aren't specifically forbidden is the fictional city of Raseir in the classic CRPG Quest for Glory 2, which boasted a street named "Everything Not Mandatory is Forbidden". So we, as Finnish citizens, have more rights than the inhabitants of a fictional computer game dictatorship.

Hooray!

But I digress. As a criterion for banning expression, the harm it causes is a dangerous guideline. In nearly every debate on free speech, someone quotes the example of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. It might be salutary to remember where the expression comes from: it was used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to justify sentencing a man to six months in prison for distributnig anti-draft leaflets. It was the judge's opinion that inciting people against the draft posed a "clear and present danger" to the United States, and was therefore illegal.

This tug-of-war between the desire to criminalize dissent and uphold freedom of expression should serve to point out that the harmfulness or harmlessness of speech is insufficient in itself as a criterion. Harm is a flexible concept that can be stretched a long way, and if we subordinate free expression to a critetion of harm, are we really willing to ban anything that can be considered, or even proven, to have harmful effects?

Suppose that someone demonstrated that people who read detective novels are more likely to commit violent crime than people who don't? Or, to take a real-life example, someone came up with data to support the decades-old idea that comic books predispose childrne to crime? Would you then be willing to ban detective novels and comic books under the same criteria as fictional child pornography? After all, they'd be harmful. Remember that as far as we know, no form of expression can directly cause a person to commit a crime; all they can do is predispose. That's a matter of much correlation and very little causation.

This is why it's dangerous, and I believe in many cases morally dishonest to argue against banning fictional child pornography just by quoting its beneficial effect on sex crime rates. That isn't actually an argument in favor of freedom of expression; it's an argument that this particular kind of expression is beneficial and should therefore be allowed. It's a whole different story, and begs the question: if the data should be refuted by a better study, would you change your mind? And would you support the hypothetical comic-book ban if data in its favor were produced? If not, you're making a morally dishonest argument.

**

In other words, this isn't a question of whether fictional child pornography is beneficial or harmful, but of what the limits of free expression are. It's been shown time and again that juging expression by the harm it supposedly causes is a primrose path to censorship. I can't believe that even the most ardent anti-child pornography crusaders would want to live in a country where all expresion is regulated based on whether it's deemed harmful to society or not. There's practically no limit to what such a dystopia might end up banning. After all, people are healthier if they're happy; therefore things that make them unhappy make them less healthy, and are therefore harmful. Under this rationale anything could be banned.

The only rationale for the outright ban on child pornography is that a child was necessarily abused to create the image. It should be recognized that this is also a problematic piece of reasoning; technically, it could equally well be used to ban pictures of terrorist attacks. Even if we accept the ban on child pornography, we can't extend it to fictional child pornography using the same rationale, because no children were necessarily abused for its creation. We don't ban other fictional depictions of crime, even other fictional depictions of sex crime, so why should the sexual abuse of children be treated differently?

Any ban of fictional child pornography necessarily creates one of two disturbing precedents: either that expression can be regulated according to its harmfulness, or that when it comes to child pornography, a different standard of civil rights prevails. Finland is currently pursuing the latter policy. Neither should be chosen by a free country.

Policing the Internet in Europe

First of all, the Matti Nikki saga continues in Finland. I wrote about it years ago, and here's a press release from Electronic Frontier Finland back in 2008 explaining the whole thing. In brief, Internet activist Matti Nikki runs a website that criticizes the Finnish and EU authorities' inefficient anti-child pornography actions. For this, his Finnish site, which doesn't contain pornography, was censored by the Finnish police under a law that allows censorship of foreign child porn websites.

Just last week, the Helsinki administrative court decided that the police were wrong to censor Nikki's site and ordered it removed from the block list. Bizarrely, they maintained that while the intent of the law was clearly to censor foreign websites that contain child pornography, the police couldn't have understood the law, and are therefore not to blame. In my Finnish-language post on the topic, I linked to Radley Balko's summation:

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The same standard operates here, as we now have a decision from our administrative court that effectively releases the police from any culpability for misinterpreting a law. The court entirely failed to address the fact that the censorship constitutes an attack on Nikki's constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. In my opinion, the sole reason Nikki's website was extralegally censored was his criticism of the Finnish authorities. The cops have just been let off the hook for that.

**

Meanwhile, in Germany, the police are taking a hand in the general elections:

Falkvinge.net: German Pirate Party’s Servers Confiscated In Police Raid — Two Days Before Election

Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage.

I have nothing to add. You'd think that in Germany, of all countries, they'd be a little leery of sending in the storm troopers to suppress a political party, but I guess not.

Independent links

Today is Finland's independence day, and to appropriately honor this country's history and its people's patriotism, I'm going to ignore it. Here's some links instead.

* Johan Norberg: GDP and its enemies

* (via The Agitator): Legalizing child pornography is linked to lower rates of child sex abuse: study

Results from the Czech Republic showed, as seen everywhere else studied (Canada, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sweden, USA), that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalization and wide availability of pornography. And most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan. Their findings are published online today in Springer's journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The findings support the theory that potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children. While the authors do not approve of the use of real children in the production or distribution of child pornography, they say that artificially produced materials might serve a purpose.

* Wired: Lieberman Introduces Anti-WikiLeaks Legislation

The so-called SHIELD Act (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) would amend a section of the Espionage Act that already forbids publishing classified information on U.S. cryptographic secrets or overseas communications intelligence — i.e., wiretapping. The bill would extend that prohibition to information on HUMINT, human intelligence, making it a crime to publish information “concerning the identity of a classified source or informant of an element of the intelligence community of the United States,” or “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government” if such publication is prejudicial to U.S. interests.

Leaking such information in the first place is already a crime, so the measure is aimed squarely at publishers.

In short, videogame hater Joe Lieberman is now going after Wikileaks by trying to criminalize publishing information concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States. Free what?

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.

Finnish police want to ban Internet discussions

More on Matti Nikki's page in Finnish. Briefly, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation wants to put people in jail for engaging in Internet discussions that "take a seemingly approving view of so-called child sex". (my translation)

So much for human rights; we're not even allowed to talk any more if we say the wrong things. Over the last couple of years, more and more things people say on the Internet are becoming criminal offenses in this country. How do you fancy going to prison for a child pornography offense because you've said something that a Finnish policeman thinks is taking a seemingly approving view of child sex? If the cops get their way, you might soon.

The Ukraine bans all pornography

The Register: Ukraine slaps ban on all porn

Porn is now illegal in the Ukraine, unless used for medicinal purposes. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko last week signed off on new legislation joining the Ukraine to an ever-lengthening list of countries that have decided to move the censorship goalposts over the last few years, from publication of porn on to simple possession of it.

(...)

On June 11, the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian parliament) made possession of pornography – not extreme porn, but ANY porn – a criminal offence. It will be punishable by a fine of 850 hryvnia - which our currency converter helpfully reveals is approximately 69 British pounds - or up to three years in prison.

Finnish readers may want to read Sofi Oksanen's column on the topic.

Meanwhile, New Zealand is looking to implement an Internet censorship scheme that sounds suspiciously familiar:

The Register: New Zealand set to join internet blocking club

Once blocking goes live, the DIA claim that the block list will focus exclusively on the first of these categories: it is reported that the DIA’s Censorship Compliance Unit has developed a list of over 7000 sites containing child pornography. If true, this is an interestingly large figure, being about five times the size of the block list maintained by the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation, and significantly larger than the lists put in place over the last year or so by other European nations.

(...)

To date, the DIA has refused to publish their list, claiming, via the Official Information Act, that to do so would be "likely to prejudice the maintenance of the law, including the prevention, investigation, and detection of offences, and the right to a fair trial".

Initially, the block list will be voluntary: ISP’s may choose whether or not to take it.

Sound familiar?

Also in the Antipodes, Australia is to begin blocking access to websites that host or sell computer games that are not suitable for children. The block, of course, will affect all Australian internet users, not just children. Other topics to be blocked by the Great Australian Firewall include websites about euthanasia.

I hope you enjoyed the Internet while it was still free.

Hello world

Hi.

Since I'll be taking over the management of this blag during Michael's absence, I thought I'd do a little introductary post.

So: hi.

That should cover it. Now, some substance.

Lately there's been quite a bit of discussion about Pirate Party in Finnish media. I'd like to present an example of one of the things Pirate Party supports and copyright holder organizations absolutely oppose: free noncommercial use of protected content.

!WARNING! The creation and publishing of the following video was a crime. It was made by a thief illegally using content protected by copyright. By viewing this video you are supporting criminal activity.

If you do choose to view it, why don't you think about that while you watch?

In Finland, censorship is not censorship

The saga of Matti Nikki's anti-child pornography website, http://lapsiporno.info, continues. I wrote about it for the first time last year; to sum up, Nikki runs a website dedicated to criticizing the way the Finnish government and most European countries are handling the problem of child pornography. Nikki's view is that no real action is being taken to stop it, and all anti-child pornography measures being taken here are ineffective.

When Finland enacted a law that permits the police to block access to foreign websites containing child pornography, they blocked access to Nikki's site. It isn't a foreign site and doesn't contain child pornography, but censored it remains.

**

At the end of May, the Finnish courts and justice ombudsman both decided that Nikki has no grounds for complaint and that his case will not be tried in the second tier of Finnish courts. The view of the official bodies involved is that the decision of the Finnish police to censor a website is an administrative decision by the police, and is not subject to judicial review.

The Finnish constitution is generally held to forbid censorship. However, the justice ombudsman has, in his wisdom, ruled that in this case, censorship is not censorship. Therefore the law is not unconstitutional, basically because they say it isn't.

**

Electronic Frontier Finland is taking the case to the Finnish supreme court (their press release, in Finnish, here); I applaud their efforts, but they are in vain. The Finnish courts routinely ignore the Constitution, which quite simply has no force in Finnish law or practice.

As it stands at the moment, the Finnish police can block access to any Internet page on the World Wide Web. We now basically have a court decision that says the police can, under the law that provides for blocking foreign websites that contain child pornography, block a foreign or domestic website that either does or does not contain child pornography. That is to say, any website on the World Wide Web. And anyone whose website is blocked will not even be informed, and cannot file a complaint.

This is not a free country.

UN bans blasphemy

Reuters: U.N. body adopts resolution on religious defamation

GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations forum on Thursday passed a resolution condemning "defamation of religion" as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech in Muslim countries.

Okay, so it's a non-binding resolution, but a resolution by the Human Rights Council nonetheless.

I'd write a longer blog post, but can't really be bothered. As blasphemy is already illegal in Finland, there's no way this can possibly affect us.

I wonder when we Europeans, collectively, will realize that we're slowly giving up most of the defining freedoms that make us a free society. In Finland we're already not allowed to criticize the police too strongly, say mean things about religions or say something that a prosecutor can interpret as being racist. Our Internet traffic is monitored by the Swedish army and soon by our employees.

There is a sustained assault on our basic freedoms going on, and no-one really cares.

Halla-aho charged with agitation and blasphemy

No sooner do I say I'm sick of it than the "race doctor" himself is back in the news.

YLE: Halla-aho saa syytteen nettikirjoituksistaan

Helsingin kaupunginvaltuutettu Jussi Halla-aho (ps.) saa syytteen blogikirjoituksistaan. Syytteen nostamisesta päätti apulaisvaltakunnansyyttäjä Jorma Kalske.

Jussi Halla-ahon katsottiin syyllistyneen uskonrauhan rikkomiseen ja kiihottamiseen kansanryhmää vastaan.

Halla-ahon katsottiin laatineen kesällä 2008 nettiin kirjoituksen, jossa islam ja sen pyhät instituutiot yhdistettiin pedofiliaan. Nettikirjoituksessa esitettiin myös, että ohikulkijoiden ryöstely ja verovaroilla loisiminen on erään kansanryhmän kansallinen tai geneettinen erityispiirre.

Syyte nostettiin Helsingin käräjäoikeudessa.

In brief, Finnish municipal politician, would-be MEP and political racist and islamophobe Jussi Halla-aho is being charged with ethnic agitation and blasphemy. The charges stem from blog posts he wrote in 2008 where he claimed Islam is a religion of institutionalized paedophilia and that laziness and welfare sponging are racial characteristics of the Somali people.

In a nutshell, that is why I oppose this kind of legistlation. If overt racism is criminalized people like Halla-aho won't speak their minds, because it's illegal. As I've said before, many of the things he's said make it clear that he's a racist and an islamophobe. Without free speech, he wouldn't say those things. And I believe he should have a right to say those things, even if I do find them personally distasteful.

Legally speaking, looking at the previous case of Mikko Ellilä and others, it seems certain Halla-aho will be found guilty and fined. The Finnish laws on ethnic agitation and "disturbing religious peace" (=blasphemy) make any speech that "insults" an ethnic group, people or religion a crime, and as Halla-aho has clearly done that, he'll probably be found guilty.

As I've said previously on this blog, I oppose Jussi Halla-aho and I oppose the ridiculous restrictions Finnish law places on the freedom of speech. So basically my stand on all this is that it sucks. I'm off to watch F1.

Cybercrime in the 21st century: linking

As related earlier, Finnish free speech activist Matti Nikki's charges were dropped on a technicality. However, the Finnish state prosecutor basically agreed with the police that posting a link to illegal material can be considered a crime. Now, as in so many other things on this front, Australia is following suit:

Sydney Morning Herald: Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

The article is worth reading. Here's a tidbit for those of you who don't believe the slippery slope argument:

The site has also published Thailand's internet censorship list and noted that, in both the Thai and Danish cases, the scope of the blacklist had been rapidly expanded from child porn to other material including political discussions.

In fact, the recently leaked Australian blacklist includes "dentists, bus companies and a tour operator"(computerworld.com), not to mention perfectly legal online gambling site betfair.com.

In the spirit of cybercrime, I'd like to take this opportunity to share a forgotten literary masterpiece with you, courtesy of somethingawful.com: Bruce Gibson's Cracked Copy, a nail-biting account of life on the razor's edge in the apocalypse of a postmodern world.

No charges against Matti Nikki

Tietokone.fi: Nikin sensuroidut sivut vapautettiin syytteistä

Matti Nikki, a Finnish Internet activist, had access to his website blocked last year by the Finnish police. (my original post on the topic is here) On the site, he criticized the Finnish police for their inefficient and unconstitutional anti-child pornography measures. In retaliation, the police added Nikki's site to their anti-child porn block list, and when he complained, they filed charges against him for distributing child pornography.

In my opinion, the charges were purely malicious, based on a technicality in Finnish law that leaves the "distribution of child pornography" so loosely defined that technically any ISP, or Google, could be found guilty.

Before you think this is a victory for free speech, the charges were also overturned on a technicality. In the decision, the Finnish state prosecutor decided to overturn the charges because it can't be conclusively proved that any of the sites Nikki linked to contained child pornography at the precise time he linked to them. Also, according to the Finnish police, the decision to not charge him will have no bearing on Nikki's site being censored.

The last part is self-evident, because the censorship is based on an extrajudicial, illegal decision by the Finnish police; it predates the criminal charges. Nikki's legal team is now trying to challenge the decision to censor his website.

In their decision, the state prosecutors upheld the interpretation that "constructing a link" (bizarrely "linkin rakentaminen" in the original Finnish) can constitute distributing child pornography, but simply posting a URL as text is not a crime.

Think about that for a moment. If you can click it, it's a crime. If you have to select it, copy it and paste it onto the address bar of your browser, then it isn't.

It should be noted that the legal basis for this interpretation is absolutely nothing. The law doesn't specify what constitutes distributing child pornography. The way I see it, if you get a Google result that gives you a link to a child porn website, they're guilty of distributing child pornography, if you can prove there was child porn on the website at the time it was linked to.

Also, the prosecutors' decision confirms my previous belief in the official definition of child pornography in Finland: anything an investigating officer looks at and believes to depict a minor. Apparently it doesn't matter if the website provides contact details and a custodian of records as required by US law; if a Finnish policeman thinks that girl looks under 18, it's child pornography, and possessing it is a crime under Finnish law.

Again, think about that for a minute. If the police think an explicit picture or video on your computer depicts a minor, you're guilty. They're not required to prove it, for instance. A majority of the censored porn sites on the Finnish block list are gay or "teen" porn, based in Western countries. Most of the US sites seem to be legal, and provide the address of their custodian of records, which would make it possible to find out if a given model on the site was a minor or not.

The Finnish police don't need to do that. They can just decide. And then you're guilty; no proof necessary.

Now, I seriously doubt they're going to start prosecuting people for having "teen" porn on their computers, but I'm just saying they could if they wanted to. And as for the status of Nikki's site and the block list, the first thing his legal team is trying to accomplish is to get the Finnish police to make an official decision to censor the site, so they can file a complaint. The censorship is totally extrajudicial so there isn't even any way to file a complaint.

This is interesting, though. I tried to find some clause in the Finnish constitution that would say that Finnish citizens are innocent until proven guilty, or that the police isn't allowed to take extrajudicial action to restrict the liberties of Finnish citizens. I couldn't find it.

Just as well, since nothing is stopping them now.

Lex Nokia is coming

Yesterday, the Finnish Parliament voted, and the Lex Nokia proposal is going ahead. They'll be voting on it later, but as Finnish parliamentary voting is what it is, the governing coalition will have the votes to see the law through.

None of this is surprising, but it is sad. Soon not only the Swedish military but also your university, housing co-op and library can monitor your Internet use.

So long, privacy. It was nice while it lasted.

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!