Over the edge
=============

Thursday 4 March 2010 00:54

Here we go again. The good thing is that there is a
lot of political talk on German state television,
the bad thing is that the level of discussion is
usually not worth watching it. The reason could be
that anyone working for the German state television
who does something the Christian political powers
don't like gets fired.

So a lot of times there's a CDU representative just
talking crap or promoting a police state. Whether
it's fighting terrorists, online-crime, child
pornography or tax evasion they always have the
same argument to push the powers of the state
further towards totalitarianism. Of course they
don't mean to do that or even realize they are
doing it. The big mistake they make is that they
always claim the extra breach of civil rights they
need is essential for fighting crime, and if they
aren't allowed to do it the criminals can never get
caught. So if you get onto someone's open WiFi and
do something criminal, the police can never catch
you, is what they say. If they don't have official
connection data from an ISP they can't do anything.
If they don't get to buy stolen Swiss bank data,
they can't do anything. If they don't have a Stasi
like organization working for them, they can't do
anything. Anything short of a police state helps
the criminals.

But that's their problem. If the police were made
up of blind people in wheelchairs, they would have
a hard time catching criminals. In the CDU line of
reasoning that would be a good reason to lock
everybody up, otherwise it would be impossible for
the police to catch any criminals, which seems to
be their ultimate goal. The CDU has a very
dangerous way of thinking about giving up human
rights just to save a few bucks on police
operations. They don't buy stolen Swiss bank data
because it's the right thing to do, they buy them
because they think it's a great investment
money-wise. Instead of whining about how powerless
they are without their precious police state the
police should show a little more creativity and
intelligence and just show us they are also able to
catch criminals in a free country.

Punishing criminals outside of the law I can do
myself, I don't need the police for that. "Badges?
We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges! I
don't have to show you any stinkin' badges!"

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2010/03/04/over-the-edge/