In the 2000s a law was passed in Denmark that allowed for extensive logging of internet traffic.

But the ISPs couldn't implement it in a practical way and essentially refused until they were given something doable. That ended up, in some cases, being "register every 500th TCP package" (or similar; it might've been DNS lookup).

At the same time, if the police wanted actual digital surveillance, they'd just contact the ISP and say "Hey, can we get ALL the traffic for this one person who is under suspicion?" and the ISPs would, in some cases I'm familiar with, comply without a court order. So there was a clear path of execution for actual surveillance while at the same time this political circus made no sense.

Imagine you're surveilling a place for criminal activity and you're recording one second of audio every 8 minutes. Surely gold nuggets are gonna leak out of that.