Manmade Law, Finland

Effi: Finnish police censors a critic of censorship

Published on: February 15th, 2008
Modified on: February 16th, 2008

http://www.effi.org/julkaisut/tiedotteet/lehdistotiedote-2008-02-12-en.html

This is an English translation of the original Finnish press release at

http://www.effi.org/julkaisut/tiedotteet/lehdistotiedote-2008-02-12.html

Press release 12 February 2008
Electronic Frontier Finland - Effi ry

Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) demands the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) of Finland to explain why it has censored a net site that criticises Internet censorship.

NBI maintains a secret blocking list of web sites allegedly containing child pornography, pursuant to a law passed last year. [Most of the major Finnish Internet service providers use this list in a DNS based filtering system under pressure from the government.] The purpose of the law is to prevent the access to the foreign sites that contain child pornography.

Now the censorship list has been appended with a site called lapsiporno.info [translates to childpornography.info] that is maintained by a Finnish Internet activist Matti Nikki. The site does not contain child pornography, but articles that criticise censorship and a list of blocked IP addresses.

Leena Romppainen, a member of the Effi board wonders: "If the site really had some illegal content, wouldn't the correct solution be to take the site down and take the site owner to the court? The site is located on a Finnish server and the name of the site owner appears visibly on the root page of the site."

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Land of the Free, Home of the Slave

Published on: September 22nd, 2003
Modified on: September 22nd, 2003
America is such a wonderfully free country that I thoroughly understand why the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration before it, is so eager to take our freedoms and spread them across the globe. 

Without the U.S government, backwards peoples will have to labor on in their own delusions, never understanding what true liberty is all about.

I am so free. If I want to paint my house, or build a deck out back, or install a new air-conditioning system, I am free to call the building inspector and get his approval first. If I want to put a new toilet in the bathroom, I am free to buy only the low-flow toilets the government approves 

I am free to buy a property near the beach, provided the government Coastal Commission approves whatever I want to do with that property. That approval might take decades, and the final thing that I build will be what the commissioners want there, not what I want, but I am free nonetheless. I know I am free because this is America. And America is a free country - the best one in the whole darned world. If you don't like our freedoms, you should move somewhere else.

Any other questions?

Unlike those pathetic souls in other less-free and non-free countries, I am free to open my own business, provided I pay my employees the minimum salary demanded by the government, and give them overtime in the exact proportion stated by the government, and offer them breaks that conform exactly to the standards set by government. I can operate my business in complete freedom, provided that I meet every one of the hundreds of pages of air-quality standards promulgated by the state and federal governments.

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