Finnish Censorship Expanding

Thomas Nybergh lets us know about the secret list maintained by the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, containing an estimated 1,700 foreign "child pornography'" sites. These are mostly in the US and the EU, and certainly not all of them contain child porn or even links to it. Finnish ISPs are required by law to block access to sites on the list, according to The Register. Finland's EFF has information about the block list, which reportedly includes a musical instrument store, a doll store, and a site of Windows tips in Thai. Recently added to the list — which by law should contain only child pornography sites — is the text-only site of a Finnish free-speech advocate who criticizes the censorship law. Evading the ISPs' block is trivial, of course.

Comments

Windows tips

[calebt3]

Windows tips in Thai That may or may not be a bad thing depending on whether the tip was get rid of it.

Wikipedia - News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters

[I confirm I'm not a]

This was on Wikipedia's front page the other day.

Foriegners

[milsoRgen]

Well Finnish culture is pretty alien to me, but digging into the article a bit, it ends up making a little more sense...

"Without knowing any details, a good guess is that the police suspect that having a clickable link to a web site allegedly containing child pornographic images is equivalent to aiding the distribution of such images," the EFFI surmised in this blog post on the censoring of Nikki's site. Here is Nikki's list.

Re:Foriegners

[muzzy]

Actually, Someone's been checking through the whole list I've published and it now appears perhaps ~15 out of 1000 might be child porn. I haven't verified this yet and I'll have to go sleep soon too so I'll do it later. Still, that's a fairly small portion. I might have to back down my claims that 99% appear legit and say that 98.5% seem legit :)

Re:Foriegners

[dgatwood]

That is, of course, a mind-bogglingly fallacious argument, though I'm sure you're well aware of that.

Based on what I've seen from phishing sites and other similarly illegal activity, I would suspect that most child porn sites (assuming they are not hosted in a country with lax laws on the subject) are either A. being hosted by somebody on a commercial server that hosts a truckload of sites and the person hosting them is hoping nobody will notice or B. being hosted on a cracked server.

In the case of A., if you try to do an IP match, you'd get truckloads of "false positives"---sites that appear to link to a child porn site, but in fact link to Ned's Used Cars and Auto Emporium's website. If you don't do an IP match, though, you miss the case where somebody creates their own DNS record for a child porn site that doesn't support virtual hosts to get around the blocking lists, so you get lots of false negatives. Either way, you lose.

In the case of B., it is probably safe to assume that 99.9% of those links existed prior to the site being hijacked to distribute child porn, and thus the owners of the site doing the linking would have no idea that the site was being used in that way, and thus should not be treated as though they were intentionally contributing to child porn.

Further, in such cases, the main page of the compromised site almost certainly wouldn't have links to the offensive content, as this would tip off the owners of the compromised site. Thus, linking to the compromised site, with the exception of links to some specific part of the directory hierarchy, wouldn't be contributing to the spread of child porn at all....

Even if a website intentionally links to porn-oriented sites that contain child porn, it is still not automatically reasonable to say that the linking site is promoting child porn unless either A. the website is linking directly to a child porn section or page on the site, or B. the primary focus of the destination website is child porn. If somebody uploaded a piece of child porn to Wikipedia, would everyone linking to Wikipedia be considered "contributing to the spread of child porn"? Why should any other website be treated differently even if it is a porn site? For that matter, if someone adds a link to a child porn site from a Wikipedia page, should Wikipedia be blocked? If the Finnish lawmakers don't have a damn good answer for these question, they need to seriously rethink this policy.

And then, there's the question about the sites hosting the porn being listed themselves. Those IP numbers on the list might contain dozens of other unrelated websites. If the server was compromised, it might not even be appropriate to block the host by its domain name, as you might be blocking a legitimate business. The correct course of action is always to notify first, allow reasonable time for response (whether in the form of removal, photo ID proof of age, etc.), then block if circumstances warrant it. The same goes for suspected copyright violations, suspected phishing sites, etc.

Re:Foriegners

[TapioNuut]

I would like to point out that the censorship law says nothing about links, or listing sites with links. And in the law itself its purpose is said to be to promote measures which can be used to prevent access to foreign child porn sites. Lapsiporno.info is neither foreign nor contains any child porn.

Also let it be known that Matti Nikki (muzzy) himself has actively reported actual child porn sites before, and some of them have been closed. Some was active even a year after reporting it. Of course, these sites are not Finnish.

The EFFI statement linked in the article is very thorough. In this case there really can be only one bias: the law is bad and the way of enforcing it is even worse.

What happens when lists go wrong

[Mr. Roadkill]

I work for a University, and we have a commercial web-filter to try to keep objectionable and time-wasting material off people's machines and out of labs.

$WEB_FILTER_VENDOR has decided that http://www.littlebigshots.com.au/ belongs under "Adult/Sexually Explicit" - whereas it is, in fact, about a childrens' film festival. I've filed a report, and locally whitelisted it until they get around to doing something about it, but still... can you imagine what kind of damage could be done by a secret ISP-level list required by government, and the embarrassment associated with challenging such listings? Who would admit to saying they tried to view a site listed by the government as a child-porn site? Well, I would - if I knew for a fact that the listing was wrong - but most people aren't like me. I wonder what else, perhaps of a political nature, might make its way onto such lists?

Re:What happens when lists go wrong

[calebt3]

Problems occur when we start automating the identification process. Bots just aren't accurate enough, and humans just aren't fast enough.

Re:What happens when lists go wrong

[sys_mast]

How do you KNOW to complain if you are unable to view the site to confirm that it does not contain objectionable material? I know if I'm blocked by work/library/etc that I can go home, check, and complain if they block something OK. But here they are talking about the whole country.(ignoring workarounds)

Re:What happens when lists go wrong

[nguy]

I work for a University, and we have a commercial web-filter to try to keep [...] time-wasting material off people's machines and out of labs.

It can't be working very well if you manage to connect to Slashdot :-)

Good idea

[Compuser]

Is there an open blacklist like this. Those of us who do use net porn are often afraid of accidentally clicking a link to something illegal like this. Once it is in your cache, you go prove you are innocent. So it'd be nice to have a blacklist of sites for personal use. It would be even better if it were like a custom DNS service which would not resolve bad sites and I were free to choose to use it.

Re:Good idea

[ultranova]

You've had a great idea, but the Finnish government haven't.

The Finnish government is a sad parody of what it once was. Once it dealt with both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and came up on top and turned the country from an economically abused agricultural colony (located at the arctic circle, as an icing on the cake) suffering from a civil war into a peaceful, democratic, industrial first-world country. The current version, on the other hand, falls all over itself trying to bow down to Russia, EU and the USA simultaneously while passing one bad, freedom-removing law after another. The new finnish copyright law, the so-called "Lex Karpela", is a perfect example: even the government which passed it itself admitted it doesn't know what it actually forbids or allows, but passed it anyway.

The Finnish list is an arguably erroneous list (it contains many sites that are seem to be perfectly legal), foisted on ISPs who are supposed to "voluntarily" ensure their paying customers can't access the sites on the list.

I assure you, the list contains exactly the entries it's supposed to: specifically, it already contains sites which merely criticize censorship. It was perfectly obvious from the beginning that this was the true purpose of the list. If these creeps actually thought of children, they wouldn't be constantly cutting funds from education to finance rising their own pay.

Is it just me, or does every country have at its helm the most disgusting subhuman slimemolds it manages to produce ? I'm starting to wonder if those medieval theories about incubi and succubi producing demonic half-human children actually have some merit; it is kinda hard to explain the origin of our Great Leaders otherwise.

A disgrace to Finland

[klmth]

Simply put, this entire list is a disgrace to the nation. The entire list was lobbied through by appealing to simple-minder think-of-the-children rhetoric without any thought given to the implication of this list. Anyone even remotely knowledgeable about technology in gneeral knew that this idea could not possibly work and would end up being abused in no time flat.

The mere existence of this kind of censorship disgusts me.

Re:A disgrace to Finland

[10Ghz]

Tell me about it. I'm fucking PISSED OFF at the legislators! How in the fuck did they manage to pass a bill that is so blatantly against the constitution? And not only that, the law is already being misused, since the blacklist contains tons of websites that have nothing to do with pedophilia! And it's supposed to only deal with foreign websites, but now they are using it to silence a Finnish website as well! So that's already three ways this law has failed! And the goddamned recording-industry is already salivating by the idea of using this technology to block access to websites that "infringe on their IP". Fuck this shit!

What I want to know is the names of each and every MP who voted for this travesty of a law! I will swear to FSM that during the next elections, I will go talk to them during their campaign and grill them about "supporting censorship". If those fucking fascists want censorship, maybe they should move to China or North Korea? Why in the hell we have such a bunch of fucking retards deciding things for us?

Speaking as a Finn, I'm deeply ashamed and fucking pissed off!

What Finland needs right about now is MASSIVE amount of bad publicity! We have this thing that we are always concerned what others might be thinking about us. And if Finland starts to be compared to China and North Korea in the international media, that just might be the trick to get this law overturned.

Re:A disgrace to Finland

[10Ghz]

Well, what I did is that I went to Parliaments website, looked for the people who presented this legislation and supported it in the relevant comission. I then wrote a polite yet very stern email to each of them, explaining the flaws of the law and the error of their ways.

BTW. the MP's I wrote to are: Markku Laukkanen, Raimo Vistbacka, Saara Karhu, Erkki Pulliainen and Mikko Alatalo. here you can read the comments those people made during the first hearing on the new legislation. Another person to write to could be Sari Essayah, who supported the legislation here (what else can you expect from a fundie?). It should also be noted that Jyrki Kasvi strongly opposed the legislation.

Make your voice heard. And know who to vote.

Gay sites

[phorm]

I notice also that a lot of the sites appear to be gay-oriented, and as least as far as the names go, don't indicate child content. I'm not going to click on them (who knows what *my* ISP is logging), but I do wonder if they're just in there because of somebody's dislike of that particular content.

Re:Gay sites

[corbettw]

I do wonder if they're just in there because of somebody's dislike of that particular content. Strictly speaking, even if the site does contain child porn, it's still on the list because of someone's dislike for that content. Whether that dislike is well founded or not, and whether it serves a greater good to society to block it or not, are different questions entirely.

Re:Gay sites

[Capsaicin]

Strictly speaking, even if the site does contain child porn, it's still on the list because of someone's dislike for that content. Whether that dislike is well founded or not, and whether it serves a greater good to society to block it or not, are different questions entirely.

A world of difference exists between the scenarios where something is banned on the basis of someone's arbitrary dislike of content and whether it is banned on the basis of duly enacted laws governing non-acceptable content. In a society governed by the rule of law the question of "[w]hether that dislike is well founded or not, and whether it serves a greater good to society" is not one properly left to nameless government bureaucrats. "Strictly speaking", the relevant question is whether the compilers of the list are giving proper expression to the legislative framework under which they labour.

An extrovert Finn

[superash]

Well, nobody in finland will protest as there is an old joke about extrovert Finns - "How do you identify an extrovert Finn? -- When he looks at your feet when talking to you instead of looking at his own" :)

Not "required" by the law

[muzzy]

"Finnish ISPs are required by law to block access to sites on the list, according to The Register"

Actually, The Register doesn't say this. There exists a law specifically crafted due to this child porn censorship program, but it technically doesn't mandate ISPs into participating to the censorship. Well, except for the fact that the people behind the law have made public statements that if voluntary "self-regulation" isn't enough, then there will be such a law. So, it's not exactly voluntary when the ISPs are being threatened, but technically they can claim it's not required by the law...

Anyway, regarding the free speech advocate who has gotten his site censored, that's me. I've written a little bit of text in English about my page and the situation.

Re:Not "required" by the law

[DMUTPeregrine]

About the site
Lapsiporno.info is run by Matti Nikki to participate in the discussion of Internet censorship, child porn on the internet and the problems related to these things. Nearly everything is written in Finnish with a few pages in English when I've wanted to target it to a larger audience. My primary purpose has been to provide information and knowledge about the subject matter from my own point of view. It was my concern that all the factual information available was from childs' rights organizations and this information tended to be biased and overly supportive towards censorship.

I started the site back in december 2005 with only one article online, outlining what I knew about Internet censorship and it would and wouldn't apply to child porn distribution. It has been my belief that censorship isn't any kind of solution to child porn, and I actually believe it'll only worsen the situation as it'll give a reason for the people involved to tighten their security and anonymity.

Over the years I've covered a bunch of issues around the subject matter, and lately I've been writing almost daily about the Internet censorship since it unfortunately was finally implemented in Finland. One of the first things I did was to publish a list of a few hundred censored sites.

Update 2008-02-17: I said above "one of the first things", I meant after the censorship was activated. Before this, I've written my opinions about why the censorship doesn't work and what should be done instead of it to fight the distribution of child porn online. Now, since I've seen some people thinking I published a list of child porn sites, I'd like to mention that nearly none of the sites on the child porn list seem to contain child porn. I certainly would not have published the full list had I considered it accurate!
About the censorship

The Internet censorship was being planned for years, and apparently three successive Ministers of Communications have been supportive to the Internet Censorship until it was finally implemented. When the ministry asked for statements about the planned censorship law from various parties, they were told by the Faculty of Law of the University of Turku that the censorship would be against The Constitution of Finland. Despite this, the ministry insisted there were no legal problems and that the censorship would be implemented.

The Ministry of Telecommunications has ordered and published some investigations about the legal possibility of censorship, and made its own interpretations of what these investigations say. For example a document that goes by the name "Railaksen Selvitys" and dated 2005-12-16 lists several critical problems and unanswered questions regarding the censorship. These problems are listed in the very beginning of the document and include things like effectiveness of the filtering solutions, the problem of collateral damage when censorship affects more material than it should, freedom of speech, what kind of crimes the censorship should exactly target, etc. Most of these went unanswered and the problems are seen with the current implementation of the censorship. Some of the issues were only addressed partially, for example the freedom of speech regarding reception of illegal material was touched but the police has now been found censoring even sites that do not contain illegal material themselves. What is being practiced now isn't what was planned.

Apparently the censorship had already been decided to be implemented even before the legality of the censorship had been touched at all. In the beginning of the resulting paper from the above mentioned investigation it's stated that "A decision of principle has been made to take action against distribution of child porn over telecommunication networks". Apparently the ministry had told the law firm that they will implement the censorship no matter what, and requested a paper to support it and to interpret the law in a way to make it look legal. Where this wasn't possible, the paper suggested w

Re:Not "required" by the law

[weicco]

I've tried to discuss this with many others at Helsingin Sanomat message board. But it is hard because when ever you try to convince someone that this isn't the right kind of tool to prevent child porn you get labeled as a child porn consumer or even a pedofile. Those who understands this issue can't do much and those who don't are closing their eyes and ears and shouting I CAN'T HEAR YOU, YOU SICK BASTARD.

I'll think I write nice letter to minister Katainen about this. I have Kokoomus membership card in my pocket and I live in Pohjois-Savo, as does Katainen, so hopefully he reads my mail. But I'm not sure how to phrase the mail so that it is polite and informative at the same time :) I'll have to think about this a little ...

It's on the DNS Level

[Coopjust]

For those of you who do not want to RTFA, this blocklist is within the ISP DNS server, so switching to a non-Finnish DNS server or running your own is all that is necessary to bypass it and access the numerous falsely blocked sites.

Re:maybe there *really was* child porn there.

[muzzy]

The references to and instrument store and doll store both relate to same blocked domain. Specifically, it's a whole Japanese ISP's web server. One of the users probably has something the Finnish Police doesn't like, and that's all it takes to block the entire server.

The reference to "Windows tips in Thai" is to a whole ISP's server blocked in Thailand. They provide free web boards, so it's fairly reasonable to assume that those free boards are used to post child porn links. Child porn groups tend to communicate over forgotten guestbooks, forums, they use freesites to publish stuff, etc.

The whole point is that these legit sites are collateral damage, and the police doesn't care the slightest about it. As a matter of fact, the police has released a FAQ which quite directly suggests that since there are so many sites on the internet it doesn't matter if a few of them are blocked.

If a sexually explicit tree falls in a forest...

[BeeBeard]

While I'm sure we all applaud your efforts at whitelisting an innocuous site, it begs the question of how much demand there really was to visit "http://www.littlebigshots.com.au" in the first place?*

I raise this question not to criticize this particular site for not being more popular or well-known, but strictly to point out that it really is the "littlebigshots.com"s of the world that are most likely to be hurt by filters in a practically irreparable way that is also difficult to quantify: How many people, worldwide, tried to access the site before it will be whitelisted by this particular filter provider?

Picture this: Somebody Google searches "children's festival," clicks on the aforementioned site, but it appears to be down. Or even worse, a warning message appears warning the user that they've just attempted to access sexually explicit material. "Well!" our hapless Google searcher says to themselves, "This is certainly not the family-friendly activity I had in mind!" and the search continues.

The site has lost potential revenue because of the spam filter, sure. But even worse, now "littlebigshots" resonates in the mind of our Google searcher as just another porn site. It is nothing short of libel by proxy.

So you can restore access to the site all you want (and again, it's a kind and responsible thing for you to do), but it doesn't fix the residual image problem that a miscategorized site may still have to cope with. This is a relatively new issue, and what I've been waiting for is the first case that's exactly on-point with this type of situation, to help sort out what kinds of rights and remedies a miscategorized plaintiff may have. So far, no good. I guess we'll just have to keep waiting.

*(I'm not linking to it again because I'm sure they don't enjoy the unsolicited ./ web traffic.)

Most are US based, 20+ Porn Actresses!

[urbanriot]

In the US waivers MUST be signed by performing actresses that they're 18 years or older. I perused the list and every US based server I looked at had known porn actresses that are 20+, let alone 19 or even 18. Guaranteed that some old guy, completely out of touch with his youth (ie. over 50), and probably unable to meet young attractive women banned anything that remotely looked under 30. This is religious conservatism at its worst and the Finnish people shouldn't stand for this repression!

Re:This doesn't make any sense!

[Dunbal]

Secondly... the point of this is that many of the sites *aren't* illegal

True dat. What happens when the legal age for sexual consent is 14, and pictures of naked 14 year olds engaged in sexual acts are viewed by someone where the legal age of consent is 18? How are you going to make a case against the website that is doing nothing wrong in its country? Are you going to go after the person viewing the content? Then you can make the argument that how can you know what is on a website without seeing it first?

Re:If a sexually explicit tree falls in a forest..

[huckamania]

This whole situation reminds me of Duty Call formations when I was in the Marines. Before putting into a port, they get all of the enlisted together and tell us what places not to visit. Sometimes we would take notes so we could get to these places faster.

Having a list of child pornography sites would seem to be a bad idea simply because now those sites are getting free advertising. Maybe they should think about encrypting the list or something.

Re:Timecops???

[muzzy]

>> They called him for questioning on Wednesday 20 February 2008.
> Oh my god! I time-travelled 2 days in the future? Or maybe Finland is on GMT+42?

The date is accurate for the questioning, the news just travels so fast that the actual questioning hasn't happened yet. They sent the "invitation" last friday (15th), and it arrived in mail this monday (18th). I got a prior notice about it through email though.

Norway has the same kind of list

[ymgve]

Norway has the same kind of list.

It seems to be more lenient, though. Lapsiporno isn't blocked, and out of a sampling of the least offensive sounding sites, "only" three out of eight were blocked.

Re:Final Solution: Kill the Children

[fastest fascist]

No, no. You must kill all the adults. After all, no measure is too harsh if it protects the children.

I think I know a couple of hundred Finnish ministers of parliament who constitute a clear and present danger to the children of Finland.

Re:The checked list

[MBGMorden]

I don't know about Finland, but in the US I certainly wouldn't consider it very wise to grab that list and "verify" what has Child Porn on it. False Positives that you identify are gonna be fine, but the minute you hit an actual Positive you've just committed a felony (no moral/ethical problem, just a legal one). It's a shame that we have to be afraid to check on stuff like this, but I'd not risk getting arrested over it.

Personally, I think a much more sane law would be that it's illegal to PRODUCE child pornography, or to buy it (as those dollars go towards producing more of it), but if you're not making it or buying it then there shouldn't be an issue if you run across it on the web. That punishes everyone who had any hand in harming a specific child while not making the rest of us walk on broken glass while surfing the web.