HELSINKI — “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”Finish police got an object lesson in the meaning of the old adage this week when it was revealed that of the estimated 1,700 websites on a list of destinations blocked for suspected involvement in child-pornography distribution, only two are known to contain inappropriate images of children. The others, according to anti-censorship organization Electronic Frontier Finland, include a site openly critical of the Finnish government, legal adult porn sites, gay forums, an online doll store, a Thai Windows advice forum and a computer repair service.
That the secretive process designed to block foreign child porn somehow has gone terribly awry indicates there’s something rotten in Finland, activists say.
Part of the problem lies in the wording of a late-2006 law that requires Finnish internet service providers to block entire Web servers, not just individual sites located on them. One inappropriate posting on one site within a block of internet protocol addresses can jeopardize every other site within the block, regardless how innocent or wholesome it may be. As a result, legitimate websites located in the U.S. and Europe and within Finland itself are being removed from the Finnish Web landscape.
“It’s a bit harsh for the Finnish police to tag them as child porn, and it certainly will hurt the reputation of these businesses,” Finnish activist Matti Nikki, creator of the anti-censorship website Lapsiporno.info, told The Register. Lapsiporno is among the websites that has been blocked. “To my knowledge, the censored sites haven’t been notified by the police about the situation either.”
What’s worse, according to Nikki, is that Finnish officials refuse to divulge the criteria that can lead to a site’s downfall, and there is no clear way for an unjustly blocked site’s owner to petition for the removal of his website from the list of banned destinations.
The situation is not without irony. Finnish surfers easily can circumvent the blockade by substituting OpenDNS addresses for the Finnish ISP addresses within their operating systems or routers.
