Finnish police said on Thursday they had launched a criminal investigation into suspected breaches of environmental law at the construction site of a planned Google data centre in northern Finland.
Finnish police said on Thursday they had launched a criminal investigation into suspected breaches of environmental law at the construction site of a planned Google data centre in northern Finland.
Judging from the content of the article, the problem is that Google’s local subsidiary started on construction prematurely before the environmental assessment paperwork was complete (but after they already owned the site). Short of keeping a watch on the site 24/7, I don’t see how the local authorities could have prevented that. It’s possible that they may have been lazy and complacent, but absent actual evidence I doubt they were complicit.
Our society operates to a large extent on an underlying assumption that most people will not try to do anything blatantly illegal in plain view. Finland has just learned the hard way that this is not true of large American corporations.
And, as Microsoft’s guy said last year, these motherfuckers think they have “social consent” (God I fucking hate that term) to do anything that isn’t explicitly illegal under the letter of the law.