Pat on the head

“The Pirate Bay has made routines to remove child porn”.

That’s according to Police officer Stefan Kronqvist the reason that they decided not to censor our site.

In an interview (in Swedish) the police talk about the reason for censoring, the reason they wanted to put Pirate Bay on the list, the reason for not doing so and how they usually work with the filter.

Basically they give us a patronising pat on the head for being good boys. But you know what? This is just a stupid after-math reason they’re giving out. We “made routines”? How about “had routines since before that the police never even cared to ask about“? And now the police try to angle it as they have done something good here, as in making us work against child porn. They have no routines of asking us for information and then blame us for not having routines (which we have) that they know about. That’s a laugh!

They basically still try to make us the bad guys, while they didn’t even contact us – the largest website within the nordic countries – before they wanted to shut us down. Sten Warmland at the police agreed that they probably wouldn’t block, when I asked if they would have just blocked another site of our size without asking first. How’s that for being equal in the eyes of the law?

I was the one to hunt down the police. They didn’t contact anyone at The Pirate Bay. Why shouldn’t they?
According to themselves they don’t contact any sites in advance (but still admit that other sites of our size would probably get treated better and be contacted). How come they gave the ISPs the information then? And how come the decision [to censor] first_was made_ then according to Stefan Kronqvist later the same day it was _not yet made_ and then again in todays interview it _was the correct decision that was made at the time_ about censoring us. Can someone please tell the police to at least have some consistency in their lying so I don’t get this confused?

As the interview also points out Stefan Kronqvist seems to think that it’s OK to block sites that do not contain child porn, but if they link to it they are allowed to block them. So let’s go quickly think about this idea in a broader sense;

• The police works against crime. They are hired by the government for this purpose and they are not to decide what is criminal (that’s the politicians task).
• It’s not illegal to link to anything as long as you don’t host the content. It’s basically giving out information on where to find more information.
• Police are not allowed to abuse their power in order to make moral judgement.
• Stefan Kronqvist says in this interview that sites has to take responsibility for their content. And he also agrees to that there is no illegal content on TPB.

So far, I think everybody agrees.

What’s the conclusion here?

There is a filter, that the police can use to block sites that do not do anything illegal.

Questioning a filter made out of the purpose of saving children is not something one dares to do. The angry neanderthal mob will throw rocks at you and call you a child molester. But this filter has nothing to do with saving children, please try to understand this! It has to do with hiding the fact that we have problems in our society with adults abusing kids. The Internet is not to blame for this. Putting a filter on telephones in order to make adults not being able to talk to kids would not be the solution either.

We need to find the people who are to blame for it and just filtering away the content is like hiding dirt underneath your rug instead of vacuuming it out. Find the responsible guy! Talk to the ISPs and tell them to help you out. Get contact with web hosters and ask them to help you out. Helping out across borders is the only possibly path to solve anything in todays global world, not filters. A filter will get used for faulty reasons, it already has at least twice in this case and it will happen again. And no children will be saved by it.