Last month, I wrote about a Finnish blogger whose website had been censored when he wrote something critical of a local school headmaster and the headmaster got the cops to take the page down. Now the coppers have backed down from their absurd, anti-speech position:
I've just been informed by Tuomas that the Deputy National Police Commissioner had found the demand made by the Oulu police to remove my posts to be unlawful. He had also admitted something that to me seems an important point: "the law regarding the freedom of speech and mass media is not known well enough among the police." This to me is what the whole mess was about: I never considered the officer in question to be evil, he just didn't know the law he was wielding.
That in itself is a serious matter, naturally, since the police of all people should know the law by which they come to dealings with people. However, I'm happy to find the police in this case willing to admit that a mistake has been made.
(Thanks, Janne!)
