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Germany Searches Credit Cards For Child Porn Payments
narramissic writes "According to an ITworld article, police in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt have teamed with credit card companies to sift through the transactions of over 22 million customers looking for those who may have purchased child pornography online. To date they have identified 322 suspects." From the article: "German data privacy laws allow police to ask financial institutions to provide data about individuals but only if the investigators meet certain conditions, including a concrete suspicion of illegal behavior and narrowly defined search criteria, according to Johann Bizer, deputy director of the Independent Center for Privacy Protection... In the case under investigation, police were aware of a child pornography Web site outside of Germany that was attracting users inside the country. And they asked the credit-card companies to conduct a database search narrowed to three criteria: a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account."
We're in a sad state of affairs. Germany here is no longer protecting its own citizens, it's preventing it's citizens from viewing things online elsewhere. Who are they protecting?
The children are likely not German, so they're not protecting the german children.
The servers are not in Germany, so they are not policing they're own internet.
They are telling people what they cannot do.
What is the reason for banning viewing these things? The usual reason is protecting children from being exploited, but one, these are not German children, and two, there is no proof they were even exploited.
They are literally telling people what they cannot do in their own homes even when it doesn't hurt anyone.
I know, i know, thinkofthechildren.
It's only a matter of time before children are carted away and a young age to be protected from the evils of the world. The Calvinists were just a couple centuries ahead of their time.
Have you read my journal today?
What I find strange with this as news is that I thought this sort of thing was already routinely done in civilized nations.
Personally, I've never heard of any law enforcement agency that was smart enough to use email, never mind search through credit card databases. Think about this... how much Internet traffic is some kind of fraud... spam, or stock pumping or account stealing, etc? 50%? Think about how many arrests you see in the news. All I ever hear about are some 15 kids caught with Kazaa running, and *very* rarely, the occasional bot network controller.
Law enforcement agencies, are, by definition, not made up of smart, tech-saavy people. They're made up of people that were the not-so-smart bullies in grade school.
You clearly have no idea what "natural selection" means. I swear the Intelligent Design nutjobs probably understand Darwin better than you do.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.