Reactions To Data Retention Ban Shows Hypocrisy Of Surveillance Hawks

Last week, the European Court of Justice – the highest court in the world’s largest economy – banned blanket data retention, declaring the federal law on the subject unconstitutional. This ruling means a reversal to an earlier state where such surveillance was a crime, organized crime. Yet, the surveillance hawks are bemoaning this ruling and even calling for people to break it.

Data Retention is the practice where the government orders that logs of all your communications are stored, so that they can be used against you later: whom you talked to, from where, when, how, et cetera. The actual conversation isn’t stored, but that’s often less sensitive than the fact that the communication took place, when, where, and how.

The scope of collected data, especially when looking at groups of people, is positively chilling. Every time somebody made a communication – any communication – their location was recorded. In effect, this has been tantamount to recording every step taken through the city in everybody’s daily lives.

Last week, the European Court of Justice banned this practice outright, ruling that it violates Fundamental Rights to have such a blanket surveillance – specifically, the right to privacy. (The specific ruling was a strikedown of the Data Retention Directive, a federal law mandating data retention in the EU, but the justification was very broad.) The court even anulled the Directive retroactively, ruling it to be so gross a violation that it had never been in effect.

Surveillance hawks haven’t rested on their laurels, despairing about how they need data retention to “fight serious organized crime”. And this, if anything, shows the immense hypocrisy of those surveillance hawks.

The highest court in the EU has just ruled that blanket data collection is criminal, and the idea of a government mandating state-scale blanket collection fits right in the bullseye of “organized serious crime”. Yet, the surveillance hawks are claiming they need to continue with this organized crime – using their own words, they need it just in order to fight organized crime.

The hypocrisy is staggering and shines a relentless spotlight on the two-tier justice system that has gradually been phased in over the past decades. It goes without saying that their own organized crime was never supposed to be called into question.

This corruption runs deep. Let’s take the Swedish Police as an example. In a statement on their web page, they don’t just criticize the ruling; they immediately sprinkle around all the fairy-dust words used to justify surveillance (“organizedcrime-childporn-terrorism”), falsely claim that EU Directives (“federal law”) are superseded by state-level laws, and makes an outright call for a continuation of this organized crime, even after the ruling:

[The Chief of Police] hopes that telecom operators has a regard for the best of society and keeps retaining data, so that the Police can keep getting access to historic communications logs.

Yes, you just saw a quote from the Principal Chief of Swedish Police calling for large-scale organized crime. Not the fight against it, but the perpetration of it. If that’s not hypocrisy, I don’t know what would be. Would you really expect this individual to say that laws don’t apply? Laws that safeguard rights on the same level as the right to life (yes, the right to life and the right to privacy really are rights on the same level)?

The cards have been called. Surveillance hawks were never after fighting organized crime. They are the organized crime.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.