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.

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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.