The Data Retention Directive has been torn up! While normal friends of human rights from both left and right celebrate, and telecom operators count their savings and better profit margins, the police is worried. Because it is of course so that the lack of data retention, just like the preservation of net neutrality, will benefit child pornography.

Hypocrisy bothers me.

Here's the deal:

• Investigating violence against children is expensive. Most violent crime against children is committed by people close to the children and it's complicated. It's easier for the police to buy hacking equipment ("digital police search") and hire IT consultants than to battle with boring, troublesome family relationships. It's also cheaper.
• Politicians don't want to take responsibility for difficult problems, such as agreeing on cross-border cooperation against violence towards children. Therefore the German police - who don't believe in hacking and filters as tools against crime - complained that police authorities outside Germany are unwilling to help trace and apprehend those who hurt children. This includes Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK. Tracing and apprehending people is expensive and a hassle.
• Therefore politicians have instead gathered roughly ever 5 years since 1990 to agree on child porn filters, like the one we have in Sweden. They sign an agreement, smile for the cameras, the media publishes, politicans get elected - it's a party in a sucky, cheap media glitz that benefits politicians, not children. Perhaps also computer geeks at the police. But I respectfully don't give a shit about computer geeks.

The organisation that started spreading the rumour that net neutrality is bad for the children is an organisation, Internet Watch Foundation, that for many years has collected money from big companies by saying that lack of support for their filtering activities means active support for child porn. TeliaSonera uses IWF's filter list, by the way (maybe they also donate money?). It so happens that large telecom operators, who donate money to IWF, are the ones who don't want net neutrality. Thus lobbying has turned the other way - big telco scratch IWF back, IWF scratch big telco, ergo net neutrality = child porn.

What I don't get is why the police can't just admit that it's cheaper for them to demand that telecom operators store data than it is for them to give their employees salary increases. Hard drives at Bahnhof are cheaper than police officers. Because it's expensive and difficult to investigate crime in a legally certain way.

And I don't understand why they don't say that it's cheaper and easier to commit computer intrusion than to have better paid investigators. Because that's exactly the way it is - we prefer an unsecure internet that we drag into each and every system we have in society on some sort of cheap, false idea of efficiency, rather than having proper criminal investigations.

The police is no different than health care, education and social care - you get what you pay for, and if you don't want to pay we instead get insecurity police, insecurity industries, mass surveillance and insecurity.

The worst thing about this is that children are additionally not being helped. We devote ourselves to cheap, inefficient, human-rights-violating populist bullshit.

Who the hell is going to take responsbility for this now?

If someone says "the immigrants" I'll puke on them.