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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.
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?
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.
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" :)
"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.
-- Matti Nikki
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.
-- Matti Nikki
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?*
./ web traffic.)
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
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 :)
-- Matti Nikki
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.
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