A website dedicated to opposing Internet censorship has ended up on a list of banned child pornography sites maintained by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). The pages, maintained by Matti Nikki, contained hundreds of links to sites that are on the NBI list. Advocates of on-line freedom have responded to what they see as censorship of a critical voice. "One faceless civil servant decides what web pages may be shown to Finns, and the decision cannot be appealed. Now he has apparently decided that filtering cannot be criticised", says Tero Tilus of Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI), a civic group defending citizens' electronic rights.

Here’s the situation in a nutshell, he says:

1. Finland implements censorship using DNS forgery

2. I scan 100k porn site addresses against a censored DNS server

3. Turns out, most of the blocked addresses don’t have child porn

4. I release the list and ask police about wtf is up with it

5. Police eventually replies and tells it also blocks sites which only link to child porn sites, even though the law doesn’t permit this

6. Since censoring sites without child porn is illegal, I provoke them a little by adding a feature to my already published list of censored sites to turn them all into clickable links…

7. Week later ISPs install the next update of the censorship list, and my whole site criticizing internet censorship is now censored

8. I try to find out if I’m being suspected of any crime, but police won’t answer my email and in the news they’re quoted saying it’s too early to say if I’ve done any crime but my site could count as “child porn portal”

9. Anyone trying to visit my web page gets a message saying the site was blocked because it contains child porn. Police is thus accusing me of possession and distribution of child porn, even though at the same time I’m not suspected of any crime!

How’s that for censorship?

Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has labeled hundreds of publicly available web sites in USA, as well as several in Germany, The Netherlands and other countries, as child pornography. The implication is that authorities in those countries are unwilling or unable to do anything about it, even when the sites operate openly and child pornography is definitely illegal in those countries as well.

Little or no attempt has been made, however, by the NBI to alert the FBI or similar authorities about said sites, with no explanation other than that the law does not require it. Given that, e.g., the FBI is well known to react quickly to reports of child porn sites even from individuals by email, it would hardly be any real strain on NBI resources to notify them whenever adding a site to the blacklist.

Why don't they, then? One cannot help suspecting the reason is that they know they're censoring sites that are not child porn at all, and attempting to initiate actual legal proceedings would reveal that - that they are in fact breaking the law themselves, as it explicitly states that only child porn sites may be put in the blacklist.

News of NBI's overbroad censorship came about when Internet activist Matti Nikki published part of the officially secret list on his web page lapsiporno.info. The NBI reacted by blacklisting his site as well, even though it contains no child porn, and after public outcry summoned him for questioning and announced he may be prosecuted for abetting child porn distribution.

Recent developments in the Finnish Internet censorship system. The Finnish police censors much more than was originally intended.

The Finnish police maintains a secret block list of web sites allegedly containing child pornography, pursuant to a law passed last year. The purpose of the law is to prevent the access to the foreign sites that contain child pornography.

Most of the censored sites are located in the United States or EU countries. Many of the censored sites have turned out to be apparently legal pornographic sites. Some of the censored sites are not pornographic sites at all.

The censorship list has been recently augmented with a Finnish site called lapsiporno.info that is maintained by an Internet activist Matti Nikki. The site does not contain any pornography, let alone child pornography, but articles that criticise censorship and a list of blocked domains. Nikki has been one of the most vocal critics of the government's net censorship project.

After a public outcry on the censorship practices the police decided to suspect Nikki of aiding the distribution of material violating sexual chastity. They called him for questioning on Wednesday 20 February 2008.