Finland censors anti-censorship site Finnish police are blocking more than 1,000 legal websites, including one belonging to a well-known internet activist, under a secretive system designed to prevent access to foreign sites that contain child pornography, according to a group that advocates for individual rights online. Among the estimated 1,700 destinations on …
This started out as a story about an effort to block childporn on the internet that did not work out too well, and probably is against the law too
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The Finnish svastika according to Wikipedia:
The swastika was adopted by the Finnish Air Force after 6 March 1918, when Eric von Rosen donated an aeroplane, adorned with swastikas (his personal good luck symbols), from Sweden to the Finnish white army. The swastika was officially adopted as the nationality marking on the Finnish Air Force planes at 18 March 1918.
Eric von Rosen had been using a swastika as a personal owner's mark. He originally saw the symbol on rune stones in Gotland, while being at school. Knowing that the symbol signified good luck for the Vikings.
His son Carl Gustaf Ericsson von Rosen was quite a character. You might remember him from Congo. Finns remember him as he took part, as a pilot, in the Winter war against Russia.
Nice of you to drop this all out of the front page.
Regards
To understand the mechanics of the cencorship in Finland better, one could read all the comments to the blogs in the Washington Post Finland diary. There is lots.
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/finlanddiary/
I will try to keep it short here:
To become a politician in the big three parties, one signs agreement to follow the party lines.
Ever since 1600's, Finland has de facto been part of Sweden. They sent the people they did not want to be there, here. They took power and still have.
There has been huge censorship in the matter of language politics for years now.
As in former communist east Europe, people have to study Swedish (for them, it was Russian, which is a big language with exemplary literature) - and nobody would like to. So to be a politician, one agrees to this. Simply put, only the corrupt and the stupid want to go to politics in Finland.
What has happened, Finland has taken the bad sides of Swedish (or German, Dutch) socialdemocracy but not the good. The state health care is the worst of all surveyed by OECD, has the biggest difference between the poor and the rich. The social offices often do take away the children to institutions for no reason, but do not give the money as in other countries, for parents to take care of them.
Obviously all this idiocracy costs millions and millions to the economy but criticism is nowhere to be found in the media, mostly the people working there/owning the media have ties to the big three parties so critisizing is not really allowed.
This is a new development that someone opposing child pornography (who explains in Finnish in his pages that he has sent adresses of child porn sites to the police, who chose to do nothing about the children being raped) who has nothing to do with what I explained above, would have to go to the police to explain his actions. Though he has nothing to worry about since he got into Cnet and The register - the police are not stupid, but usually they just do not care. Someone probably ordered them to accuse him so they did. But they care about PR so he's safe. And if not, he can always emigrate, IT pros are needed round the world and get better pay in most countries, compared to Finland.
The ministers, former minister Huovinen and recent one Linden are the ones to blame for this new development. Apparently this blocking was copied from the other Nordic countries, they copy the bad things, not the good things.
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