.00146 percent

Yes, folks, that's right. The German police have sifted through 22 million credit card payments in order to discover 322 suspicious transactions that might be child-porn subscribers. Do the math. The "success rate" for this was that less than two thousandths of one percent of the transactions investigated were pulled.

I am outraged by this - and by the press happily writing about the "porn ring" being broken. This is a violation of our data privacy rights! The police are only allowed to do searches like this if they have a specific and very narrow search they want to do.

This is just like the "Rasterfahndung" the police tried to do during Germany's "terrorist-fighting days" back in the 70s. Yes, we survived that, just barely. Only the German Wikipedia has a link on the Rasterfahndung, gonna have to translate this.

Back then the police felt that people who paid electric bills for people of a different name, and paid cash to boot, were suspicious of aiding and abetting "terrorists". That this sort of makes everyone potentially guilty and trounces on the right of informational self-determination is beside the point for the police. They want this information, the data bases are ready, "if you are not guilty you have nothing to fear" - so they take it.

Why are people not screaming? Don't they understand how horrible this is? You suddenly have to prove your innocence if they accuse you of being a "terrorist"? This scares me silly.

Probably because I paid the electric bills for the group of people I lived with. In cash, after collecting from everyone. And the person who signed for the electricity had long ago moved on......