Today, 17 April, EDRi, in a coalition with 48 civil society organisations and 26 individual experts, call on Member State representatives not to agree to the proposed EU Council position on the Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) Regulation whilst so many critical issues remain.
Dear politicians,
stop assaulting our rights,
and start fighting for our rights,
unless you’d like to be yeeted out of parliament.
With kind regards,
every aware citizen.
I think what ultimately made me realise how fucked up things had truly gotten, was an article I read a few years ago.
A man had been assaulted by masked police in his sleep, beaten, and then taken to interrogation, where he sat for hours without really knowing what the hell was going on, until they finally started giving him information. When they finally showed him evidence, it turned out that they had gotten it completely wrong.
This “evidence” in question were pictures of him shagging his boyfriend. The police had gotten it from some American organisation, and then just acted on it, believing that he was holding a minor hostage and raping him. He wasn’t; his boyfriend, the “minor” in question is in his 30s.
Some American organisation skimmed through his Yahoo mail, sent the photos to Swedish law enforcement, who promptly sent out a group of masked thugs they later weren’t able to identify or punish, assaulted an innocent man, and essentially kidnapped him, all legally. No justice was ever meted out for this either, the man, his mother, and the boyfriend no longer felt safe in Sweden, and they’ve all moved abroad.
Does all this privacy infringement lead to criminals getting punished? Oh yeah I’m positive
they doit does, just like stop and frisk probably caught some criminals too, but not without violating over 80% of the people stopped that were completely innocent regular people.That’s not a price we should be so eager to pay.
can you post some sources? preferably in English
There’s a Swedish article about it on SVT, the Swedish national news media outlet. It’s actually strangely long for being on SVT, I think there’s some anti-competition laws that prevent them from doing journalism with too much detail.
I believe the original source is this article from Kontext Press.
Edit: I ought mention that I tried, but I struggled to find any articles about in English.
For some additional context though; the American organisation that tipped off the police here in Sweden was the NCMEC, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
The police examined the boyfriend whom they’d described as “not prepubescent”, to ensure that he has the same birthmark that appeared in the pictures.
The prosecutor that signed off on the decision to raid this man’s home, Titti Malmros has resigned.
Also this gem, which is from the Kontext Press article.
I can’t help but read this as; it’s perfectly okay to break into a person’s home in the middle of the night, assault them, and take them away from their home without informing them of where they’re going or why, but you can’t possibly accuse a police officer of misconduct; that requires a lot of proof which is magically unobtainable.
I think part of it is a fundamental weakness in the Swedish judicial system where you need clear perpetrators and clear victims, meaning that if you have a group of people committing a crime and you can’t prove that they intentionally cooperated to commit the criminal act or who did exactly what, they may go free (exhibit A). The same goes if you can prove the crime but not the victims (exhibit B).
Of course the bar is higher when it comes to the police, they will pull out all the stops to prevent one of their own getting investigated, but this issue runs even deeper.
The thing is, the politicians working against us have been voted to be there. They convinced enough people that what they’re doing is good for them. Also, there are also politicians that are working for our rights, there’s a reason this has been on the table for so long without actually being implemented.
Honestly i think as citizens we should start setting up guillotines outside parliaments. That should remind them that they may feel invulnerable but we can always get them.
Bonus: to really scare them, set up a little cooker thing with a table next to it. The phrase “eat the rich” comes to mind, though in this context it would be more like eat the powerful