A message, from a Finnish Pirate to the Australian Government.

Janne emailed this message to the Pirate Party International (PPI) mailing list, and we publish it here for all to read.

Hello,

 

I decided to write some bits about the Australian Internet filtering, which now appears to becoming full-spread, as described on their governmental website: http://bit.ly/IcEZ6 . I’m opposing all kinds of Internet censorship and I think many other pirates are feeling the same way.

 

I’ll quote shortly here the Australian governmental statement:

 

“ISP-level content filtering is already occurring in other countries, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

 

The Government wants to ensure a similar level of protection for
internet users in Australia.”

 

As a Finn it greatly pisses me off that Finland is mentioned there, as a some kind of positive example of censorship. What a load of bullshit, frankly. Internet censorship in Finland has been an utter farce. I’ll shortly describe what has happened here.

 

Finnish ministry of communications introduced a law about making it possible for ISPs to censor Internet. Censorship was optional for ISPs, but the minister of communications gave out a statement saying that if not enough ISPs would start filtering, it would be made mandatory. IIRC, most of the major telcos got onboard, but a number of smaller, geekish providers resisted.

 

Technology used in filtering was mainly DNS-based. A Finnish Internet activist Matti Nikki (from Sony DRM rootkit discovery fame) used a bunch of web crawling scripts and reverse-engineered the list of addresses (which is normally classified, and apparently there are next to none possibilities to get one removed from the list). He published his findings on a dedicated website http://lapsiporno.info (“childporn.info”). People audited the list, and found out (IIRC) that there was < 5% actual child pornography. At some point the list contained quite outrageous misplacements, such as a memorial page for Thai Princess, violin factory, and at some point even the World Wide Web Consortium… There was also very high percentage of legit gay pornography sites listed.

 

After the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) found out that Nikki, going by the handle muzzy, was publishing the list, his lapsiporno.info domain was placed on the list also! So now we had a state-censored political activist in our living-room also, but we still continue to hypocrisy over the Chinese censorship situation.

 

It seemed that an officer from NBI started to hold some kind of twisted personal grudge against Nikki, who was later accused of distributing child pornography because of his publication. The censorship list is believed to be compiled by the aforementioned officer and I personally think he has also something against the gay community, because of the many gay sites on the list. Nikki was later freed of charges, but his site is still on the censorship list. He has complained about this on several juristic institutions, some of them having not taken the case at all because they have interpreted the law as Nikki having no chance to getting off the list. He is currently complaining to supreme administrative court.

 

Then a quick anecdote about myself. At some point apparently a Finnish ISP worker leaked the official censorship list to Wikileaks. Quickly, a misspelled domain ymphets-stars.com was spotted. I registered it, put some anti-censorship content online and contacted some decent lawyers. I asked them to get my domain off the list. It took almost half a year or so, until my site was free again.

 

Nowadays a lot of Finnish ISPs have made the filtering voluntary, possibly because all the bad karma they have received from different issues. Matti Nikki’s fight however goes on.

 

As I pointed out earlier, what made me write this piece was that that in the Australian governmental statement Finland was held as a positive example of web filtering. This could not be farther from the truth. If somebody of you “highly-ranking” pirates are going to have for example interviews or debates about the Australian censorship situation, you can possibly remember what is actually going on in Finland and tell the audience about it. Remember this. Spread the word.

 

For references, see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info

 

Janne Paalijärvi,
Member of Finnish Pirate Party