Welkom in Nederland: Laid-back, chilled, and MONITORING everything The Dutch government is pushing changes to its national law to enable bulk data surveillance and compelled decryption. The proposed update of the Intelligence & Security Act of 2002 would establish bulk interception powers for “any form of telecom or data transfer”. As well as metadata, the revamp would allow the Dutch …
there was an outcry a few years ago when it was discovered that KPN & some other dutch telcos were performing 'secret' deep packet inspection on GSM/ mobile data traffic.
NL Parliament/Eerste Kamer & Tweede Kamer had a debate and promptly banned the practice.
I asked a mate who worked in NL telecoms, what actually had changed, following the Parliament debate.
Nothing, he said, it's still full-take, that was just Parlieamentary Public Relations, a big lie,
allegedly
This comes as no surprise - it's a place where your neighbors will find you suspicious if you close your curtains. NL already has some of the highest number of wiretaps of any Western country and there are laws on the books making it illegal for more than 3 people to gather....
It's a strange place with a lot of remnants of feudalism - eg. until a few years ago the monarchy appointed all the mayors and because of the lack of a parliamentary majority, the prime minister is generally appointed by the king after a vague, opaque process. The famous Dutch liberalism also masks a deeply conservative country where large chunks of the population make US fundamentalist Christians look like liberals....
It's a place where conformity and uniformism is prized. As the Dutch say, 'if a nail sticks up, you must hammer it down'.
And, before you say 'you don't know what you are talking about', I lived there for years, studied the political & social system as part of my graduate studies and have a Dutch partner who is an NL gov't official... I also started my first company there, I won't even get into the Kafkaesque rules around business and what happens to you if your company every fails...
All that said, it's lovely place to visit, and the Dutch are extremely friendly. But living there is a different story.
A neighbour behaves as if owning one of the largest houses in the street means he owns the adjoining streets too. The friction points are multiple visitors' car parking and his garden boundary trees growing to great heights. Another neighbour put this lack of neighbourly consideration down to his being Dutch. My opinion was that he probably lives in England because that attitude would not be tolerated by a community in The Netherlands.
The saying is more precisely translated as "The nail that sticks up gets hammered (down)". The Dutch are indeed a very closed people. But trust me in saying that most Dutch don't like the rules about business any more than you did. (They are indeed ridiculous) but somehow the government in the Netherlands seems even more detached from reality than in most countries.
I sincerely hope this law WON'T pass, the Dutch inteligence agencies already have plenty of options to spy on us. They don't need more. In fact, they need FAR less and FAR MORE oversight. Unfortunately there is just no-one worth voting for at the moment who will do ANYTHING about this. Every election for the past 12 years at least has been a farce with noone worth voting for. The outcome of this is we can choose pretty much left wing or FAR left wing parties. No other choices available.
Every election for the past 12 years at least has been a farce with noone worth voting for.
Dear Christ, sounds like the UK...
Mind you, the more and more insane need to spy on every one & thing makes me think the current rulers think they can stop entropy.
I hope I'm around when the house of cards comes crashing down...
"All that said, it's lovely place to visit, and the Dutch are extremely friendly. But living there is a different story."
I agree with your last statement up to a point. However, from your history, it seems you lived in the high rarified altitudes of Dutch society(people in bad shoes and suits). Your points are all valid. Step down to the man on the street, and you'll find things are slightly different.
I still maintain that you don't know what you are talking about, The "appointing" of a mayor means the King signs for it. He has no influence on who is nominated.
That being said, the nominations are not a very transparent and democratic process either.
Same goes for the appointment of the prime minister.
Thinking about it, I think the one about the nail and hammer IS an imported saying. The native Dutch one would probably be: "Hoge bomen vangen veel wind" (High trees catch a lot of wind). Being used pretty much in the same way as "The nail that sticks up get hammered".
If they are going to force people to decrypt data I was pleased to note:
either by providing encryption keys or turning over decrypted data
Handing over a piece of plain text is, IMHO, much less bad than having to hand over keys. You know what the spooks have, something presumably itemised in a court order. Hand over the keys and a lot of other stuff is now readable by them as well.
Really, that photo is a bit insulting. I've lived in NL for many, many years, and I've only seen one old timer wear "klompen" and he worked his garden in them.
Who gets to pick which photo is used with the articles? Maybe a bit of sensitivity training would be in order?
Thank you sir, may I have another down vote?
heh.. yeah .. Everybody Knows the dutch habitually dance around in clogs, 19th century clothing only ever worn by the ultraconservative religious-nutter inbred fishing communities, around and between our windmills, holding bushels of tulips while we're at it.
...and singing "Puppet on a String"
RIP for ixquick.nl, yep, 5-eyes partner (seemingly as much as any other available search service provider)
so lets start a canonical list of countries where we trust them to host private data
lets see, A...? Albania?? (nope, http://www.shqiperia.com/ is based in Dallas)
B
C
. . .I give up
oops, does look a bit stifling for freedom, democracy & allowing the IoT to develop as a business/society enabler
So long as they have tall blond women on bicycles with liberal attitudes to sex and the consumption of mind altering substances in a consequence free environment they're sound as a pound.
BTW, my friend's dad used to wear klompen all the time, so this photo is entirely accurate.
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