Finnish Minister Wants To Expand Pornography Censorship
New submitter jdela writes "Finnish Minister for Justice Anna-Maja Henriksson backs expanding FInland's child pornography blocklist to also include websites with animal porn and largely-undefined 'violent pornography.' Her proposal does not have the unanimous backing of the Finnish government, with Minister of Interior Päivi Räsänen doubting the need to expand pornography blocks. Under current law, adopted in 2006, the Finnish NBI maintains a blocklist of foreign sites linked to child pornography. This blocklist is enforced on Finnish Internet users."
the way to hell is paved with good intentions
animal porn
Watch out, Finnish bronies.
Päivi Räsänen
Ok, now that's just umlaut abuse.
Says who? It's sexual freedom at the very least which is a form of free speech. Having undefined "violent" pornography one could easily find consensual BDSM, rough sex, rape play, homosexuality and other sexual acts which are very normal.
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I think animals should be able to watch whatever they wish...
This Slashdot submission is about Finland. It's a different country. Different countries have different consitutions. The First Amendment to the US Constitution does not have any legal force in Finland.
Define animal porn.
Female human, Muppet drummer.
Some of us want our kids to grow up in a world where only healthy behaviors exist.
Indeed. And I find your willingness to arbitrarily define things as "not speech" to be deeply unhealthy. For my children's sake, please go offline immediately.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The law actually says the list is supposed to be used against sites outside Finland. Not sites residing in Finland. And even then this particular site has no child porn on it. And why would you block a local site ineffectively when you can just go and take the server out?
Remember the censorship and blacklist has been in use for years. Matti Nikki found out that many of the sites are totally within laws and has been compiling a list of them. Curiously, many of the false positives contained gay porn.
This story is about expanding the censorship, but it's already being used to block other than child porn sites. I'm not quite sure about the situation nowadays but originally there was no way for you to file a complaint about ending up on the list. If I recall correctly, Matti Nikki found out that apparently the police compiling a list does not constitute an official ruling, so there's no way to complain about it.
You know the major ISPs in Finland already block The Pirate Bay? It's painful for me to say, but the good thing in TPB block is that at least it got done by a court order. One way or another, sites like lapsiporno.info and TPB are going to get blocked. Then there are the online casinos, "extremists" and you know, all the Bad guys(tm)...
Tapio 'itn' Nuutinen
... Finland was seen as the world leader in free and open internet communication? This would be bad news anywhere, but coming from .fi it's particularly sad.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The child porn blocking is enforced only on DNS servers. It is not mandatory, so ISP may opt not to block traffic. And of course you can run your own name servers (provided your ISP does not block port 53) even if your ISP blocks child porn.
I would assume in "circles" it is known how to circumvent this blocking. And I guess many will use TOR or some VPN to hide their tracks. DNS-level blocking just makes it more difficult to police to pick the "easy ones" who would not use any hiding techniques if everything would just work by default.
And DNSSEC breaks with DNS blocking, as designed.
Section 12 - Freedom of expression and right of access to information
Everyone has the freedom of expression. Freedom of expression entails the right to express, disseminate and receive information, opinions and other communications without prior prevention by anyone. More detailed provisions on the exercise of the freedom of expression are laid down by an Act. Provisions on restrictions relating to pictorial programmes that are necessary for the protection of children may be laid down by an Act.
Documents and recordings in the possession of the authorities are public, unless their publication has for compelling reasons been specifically restricted by an Act. Everyone has the right of access to public documents and recordings.
I've never quite understood how you can say "Allowing (x) to happen imposes your viewpoint on me". If you have a viewpoint, that's your viewpoint. You're free to judge people who do (x). You don't have to do (x). Meanwhile, you're perfectly willing to see a law stating "You cannot do (x). (x) is now illegal." All the people who want to do (x) must now conform to your viewpoint or be criminals.
How is "You may do this, or may not, depending on your choice," more imposing than "You may not do this"? How in the world is freedom more imposing than restriction?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
/signed another parent
I've seen suppression and repression backfire over and over again, including with regard to my own parents' handling of me. When you make something as basic and integral as human sexuality a secret, taboo thing, it drives anybody with initiative and intelligence straight into it. I took it as a personal insult that fundamental knowledge was being hidden from me, so around the age of 10 I started a clandestine campaign to learn everything I could on sexuality. I was reading sexual self-help books in public libraries (this was before the internet was common) before puberty, riding my bike to convenience stores to scope out the smut mags, etc. Not because of peers, or "the sexualized media" or any of the bullshit moralists decry, but because of my parents' own apparent disrespect for me. I wouldn't stand for it, and, as an adult and parent now, I can realize that it was an unhealthy way for me to have explored human sexuality, alone and indignant.
If a child is old enough to ask an honest question, they are old enough for an honest answer. That has been the lesson I learned from my parents' mistakes, and the philosophy I've lived by as a parent myself. The goal of parenthood is to make children as responsible as possible as quickly as they are up to the task. Children must know in order to understand, and understanding is the only way they can build a framework to live in the real world responsibly and safely. Prohibition and proscription DO NOT WORK. Each person, and children *are* people, must develop in themselves informed reasons as to why certain behaviors are not healthy for them. They cannot be made proxies for the mores and tastes of others by rote indoctrination, at least, not for long. Doing that sort of thing is like coiling a spring, and as soon as they break out on their own, all of that is very likely to explode, and some don't actually survive the experience.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Define animal porn.
Humans are animals. To disagree would mean you don't grasp basic concepts like Plant vs Animal Kingdoms. Do you FUCK? Well, then you're an animal, and a video of humans practice-mating is thus animal porn. Bestiality is interspecies porn... They could have said interspecies porn. Oh, but white folks have Neanderthal DNA, so what then we outlaw the interracial porn too, eh?
Will Animal Planet be banned?
Who gives a fuck? You think banning anything actually keeps people from seeing it? Censorship laws are disgusting and ineffectual. They're simply the tools of a police state. The more stuff like this is illegal the more chance they'll find some excuse to throw you in jail if they don't have a legitimate reason, other than wanting you in jail.
To the folks who don't care if "Child Porn" or "Violent Porn", or "Animal Porn" is criminalized: Any web site you visit the world over could have a 1x1 pixel iframe that points to barnyard or kiddie porn, and your browser will happily download that smut without you ever even knowing it. This shit isn't hypothetical, this is what script kiddies do for fun when they get a XSS or SQL Injection exploit to work -- You don't even have to be going to anywhere in particular to get illegal 1's and 0's on your hard drives now. Why would they do this? Simple: Point out how Fucking Stupid Censorship Laws are to regular folks. Joe Sixpack won't fight back until they feel the boot of oppression at their own throats. Cleaned this crap off a client's Wordpress install just last week, wiped it out of few phpBB install a month before that. They had CP, and Snuff sites in the URLs. I don't condone or participate in such malicious behavior, but I can sure as hell understand their motives.
Now, go clean your web cache, you donkey molesting, murder masturbating, pedophiles. Don't forget to forensically shred the empty space on your drives to make sure it's really gone -- Got SSD? Bah, you better have already been running with whole drive encryption then. Oh your not a "pervert"? Are you sure that's what your Internet cache will always say? You trust the security of everywhere you go online? Oh sure, it was an "accident", you had no idea how that sort of illegal content got on your system. Then why do the logs show you regularly visited those perverse sites, at times when we know you were the only one at home to do so... Pray the site owners will back you up -- If you can even determine which ones they were in order to contact the sysadmins.
Do you really think the world is this simple?
Allow everything then; now you've got maximal freedom and all our problems go away.
Right?
Oh -- that's not so. How could that be? It turns out that societies are defined by their values, not by allowing everyone to do everything (having no values).
The current dogma approved by your government, media and social group is that allowing any behavior is good, and restricting any behavior is bad.
But life isn't that simple, unless you're talking about a loyalty test to an authoritarian regime.
You're attempting to blame me for lacking wisdom while in a state of ignorance. For a child, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to wisely act while also being ignorant, hell, it's hard for a child to wisely act even with knowledge, but at least there is more rational case to be made for culpability/responsibility ("you knew better"). Parents are supposed to help children develop the circumspection and discernment necessary to approach things of which they are ignorant with some baseline of wisdom. What I had at age 10 was insufficient to the task and compounded by the fact that everybody around me was attempting to obstruct and suppress rather than enlighten and explain. It turned the effort into a battle, which is exactly what caused my 'overreach'. This is not a self-sourced catalyst no matter how hard you try to blame me. I, being an ignorant child at the time, did not have a framework in which to say to myself, 'I'm going to find out all the craziest shit' because I didn't even know what that was. My bumblings about were based on a elementary understanding of how to look for things and hearsay. So, your attempt to shift blame upon my child self is demonstrated false.
What I am doing as a parent is nothing like having 'no standards'. The primary difference is that I refuse, under any circumstances, to suppress information when asked a direct and specific question. From there, I certainly am not going to say to a child 'go do whatever'. I routinely proscribe activities I feel my daughter is incapable of doing based on my assessment of her maturity and competence. However, I not only have no illusions that those proscriptions on action are temporary, but as soon as I feel she's up to acting I tell her so. (In fact at such points I usually *mandate* that she start acting.)
Proscription cannot be treated as some kind of fire-and-forget solution to parenting, and I've seen that done both personally and to 3rd parties, frequently to great detriment (but that's the kids' fault, according to you). It further seems to be your attitude, since your hangups and repressions seem to range far afield to all manner of *adult* interactions.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit