Finnish Minister Wants To Expand Pornography Censorship 270
New submitter jdela writes "Finnish Minister for Justice Anna-Maja Henriksson backs expanding FInland's child pornography blocklist to also include websites with animal porn and largely-undefined 'violent pornography.' Her proposal does not have the unanimous backing of the Finnish government, with Minister of Interior Päivi Räsänen doubting the need to expand pornography blocks. Under current law, adopted in 2006, the Finnish NBI maintains a blocklist of foreign sites linked to child pornography. This blocklist is enforced on Finnish Internet users."
and so it begins... (Score:4, Insightful)
the way to hell is paved with good intentions
Re:What are we going to miss out on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Says who? It's sexual freedom at the very least which is a form of free speech. Having undefined "violent" pornography one could easily find consensual BDSM, rough sex, rape play, homosexuality and other sexual acts which are very normal.
Re:and so it begins... (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
I really, REALLY hate these cases, because you can't really oppose them without being labelled as a pervert, this is why lawmakers love to bundle their censorship laws with provisions like these.
Outlaw and block child porn. No one in their right mind can find fault in that.
Protect the children, implements blocks to do that.
Outlaw animal porn, it is after all filthy, right?
Outlaw porn altogether.
Outlaw writings about porn.
Outlaw religious satire
Outlaw religious criticism
Outlaw criticism
Outlaw free speech.
All of these have been seen before in various countries, It is a slope lawmakers won't admit, but it is invariably the end result.
Re:Science time. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us want our kids to grow up in a world where only healthy behaviors exist.
Indeed. And I find your willingness to arbitrarily define things as "not speech" to be deeply unhealthy. For my children's sake, please go offline immediately.
Re:Science time. (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have any science for your definition of "healthy behaviours"? I know that God killed many kittens for my behavior, but my behavior isn't unhealthy: God's reaction is.
Remember when ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... Finland was seen as the world leader in free and open internet communication? This would be bad news anywhere, but coming from .fi it's particularly sad.
Re:and so it begins... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could easily find a fault in outlaw child porn.
For starters, the abuse that comes from it, like people that lose their job and whole their social life because somebody planted child porn on their pcs, which isn't really common, but its not unheard off.
Secondary, children themselves that send pics of them naked to their boyfriend/girlfriend. At the age of 16 or even 14 in many countries they can fuck, but if they send a picture of themselves naked, they are distributing child porn. Its not so much a fault with blocking child porn as their is a fault with the rules made. If you allow sex at 16 but down allow naked pictures of 16 year olds... I mean, legally I could go fuck a 16 year old but I would be a pedophile if I recorded it.
Oh, and lets bring in our friends the RIAA and MPAA, the free distribution of movies devaluates movies and costs the industry several times the BNP of the world each year. Thus if we allow free distribution of child porn, not for profit, we are effectively devaluating the child porn industry, likely bringing them debts of trillions per year, destroying the whole business. At least, that is if the MPAA and RIAA are correct in their analysis, but aint nobody that doubts that.
Re:and so it begins... (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
Only cowards use censorship.
Re:Hypocrite. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never quite understood how you can say "Allowing (x) to happen imposes your viewpoint on me". If you have a viewpoint, that's your viewpoint. You're free to judge people who do (x). You don't have to do (x). Meanwhile, you're perfectly willing to see a law stating "You cannot do (x). (x) is now illegal." All the people who want to do (x) must now conform to your viewpoint or be criminals.
How is "You may do this, or may not, depending on your choice," more imposing than "You may not do this"? How in the world is freedom more imposing than restriction?
Re:What are we going to miss out on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Define animal porn.
Humans are animals. To disagree would mean you don't grasp basic concepts like Plant vs Animal Kingdoms. Do you FUCK? Well, then you're an animal, and a video of humans practice-mating is thus animal porn. Bestiality is interspecies porn... They could have said interspecies porn. Oh, but white folks have Neanderthal DNA, so what then we outlaw the interracial porn too, eh?
Will Animal Planet be banned?
Who gives a fuck? You think banning anything actually keeps people from seeing it? Censorship laws are disgusting and ineffectual. They're simply the tools of a police state. The more stuff like this is illegal the more chance they'll find some excuse to throw you in jail if they don't have a legitimate reason, other than wanting you in jail.
To the folks who don't care if "Child Porn" or "Violent Porn", or "Animal Porn" is criminalized: Any web site you visit the world over could have a 1x1 pixel iframe that points to barnyard or kiddie porn, and your browser will happily download that smut without you ever even knowing it. This shit isn't hypothetical, this is what script kiddies do for fun when they get a XSS or SQL Injection exploit to work -- You don't even have to be going to anywhere in particular to get illegal 1's and 0's on your hard drives now. Why would they do this? Simple: Point out how Fucking Stupid Censorship Laws are to regular folks. Joe Sixpack won't fight back until they feel the boot of oppression at their own throats. Cleaned this crap off a client's Wordpress install just last week, wiped it out of few phpBB install a month before that. They had CP, and Snuff sites in the URLs. I don't condone or participate in such malicious behavior, but I can sure as hell understand their motives.
Now, go clean your web cache, you donkey molesting, murder masturbating, pedophiles. Don't forget to forensically shred the empty space on your drives to make sure it's really gone -- Got SSD? Bah, you better have already been running with whole drive encryption then. Oh your not a "pervert"? Are you sure that's what your Internet cache will always say? You trust the security of everywhere you go online? Oh sure, it was an "accident", you had no idea how that sort of illegal content got on your system. Then why do the logs show you regularly visited those perverse sites, at times when we know you were the only one at home to do so... Pray the site owners will back you up -- If you can even determine which ones they were in order to contact the sysadmins.
It's anti-Soviet to think as I do. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think the world is this simple?
Allow everything then; now you've got maximal freedom and all our problems go away.
Right?
Oh -- that's not so. How could that be? It turns out that societies are defined by their values, not by allowing everyone to do everything (having no values).
The current dogma approved by your government, media and social group is that allowing any behavior is good, and restricting any behavior is bad.
But life isn't that simple, unless you're talking about a loyalty test to an authoritarian regime.
Re:You're confusing two things here. (Score:5, Insightful)
What I am doing as a parent is nothing like having 'no standards'. The primary difference is that I refuse, under any circumstances, to suppress information when asked a direct and specific question. From there, I certainly am not going to say to a child 'go do whatever'. I routinely proscribe activities I feel my daughter is incapable of doing based on my assessment of her maturity and competence. However, I not only have no illusions that those proscriptions on action are temporary, but as soon as I feel she's up to acting I tell her so. (In fact at such points I usually *mandate* that she start acting.)
Proscription cannot be treated as some kind of fire-and-forget solution to parenting, and I've seen that done both personally and to 3rd parties, frequently to great detriment (but that's the kids' fault, according to you). It further seems to be your attitude, since your hangups and repressions seem to range far afield to all manner of *adult* interactions.