Finnish court: It is alright to censor a website that criticizes censorship
The Supreme Administrative Court in Finland ruled today that Finnish police didn't break the law when a famous anti-censorship website was added to its censorship list.
Back in 2006 Finland implemented a censorship legislation that targeted websites distributing child pornography. Legislation handed the National Bureau of Investigation rights to add child porn sites to its secret block list which national ISPs would then implement and enforce.
As the process of blocking the sites is done in secret and the list of blocked sites has never been officially made public, an individual, Matti Nikki, decided to create a site called lapsiporno.info (translates as child porn dot info) criticizing the secretive process and the fact that there's no way to make an official complaint about one's site being listed on such block list. He also hosted on his site a list of sites known to be on the list, but didn't contain any child porn material whatsoever.
After his website gained popularity, especially in Finnish tech media, his site, too, was added to the NBI's block list.
Nikki sued the NBI for adding his site to the list. First, the Administrative Court of Helsinki ruled that inclusion of his site was illegal on the grounds that the block list was meant to block only sites hosted outside Finland (whereas Nikki's site was hosted and maintained in Finland). The case proceeded to the highest administrative court in Finland, the Supreme Administrative Court, which today ruled that adding Nikki's site to the censorship list was legal.
