New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly • Hacker News Board

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#31

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

wbhart wrote: post #28

It's odd to see the Netherlands referred to as previously being privacy conscious. Back in the mid 2000's I recall looking in the CIA Factbook and noting that the Netherlands intercepted more telephone calls and did more internet monitoring than just about any other country, per capita (of course "Fact" was used rather loosely in the title of that book). Hackers in the Netherlands were introducing regular pulses into…

I wrote about this at length:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/wholesale-privacy-violations-in-t...

We're definitely not doing well at all on this front and it is getting worse rather than better.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#32

Post by kiiski » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #6

I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is fundamentally more privacy-friendly than the US, in black-letter terms? US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limite…

Finland, at least for now, doesn't allow mass collecting of data. There is no foreign intelligence either (except of course military sigint along the border). Finland isn't part of any military alliances, so there is no sharing of intelligence with allies.

These might of course change in the future. Since the Snowden leaks, there has been lobbying to give the military and Supo ("protection police", roughly the Finnish NSA, but police rather than civilian) the right to spy abroad and mass collect data. The Ministry of Transport and Communications is opposing the mass collecting part, but everyone else seems to be supporting it.

Some of the media and politicians are constantly trying to convince people that we have to join NATO ("The European Defensive Alliance" as they like to brand it), but I doubt that is going to happen any time soon.

Of course most data traveling to/from Finland passes through Sweden, which shamelessly spies on it.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#33

Post by wbhart » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #31

wbhart wrote: post #28

It's odd to see the Netherlands referred to as previously being privacy conscious. Back in the mid 2000's I recall looking in the CIA Factbook and noting that the Netherlands intercepted more telephone calls and did more internet monitoring than just about any other country, per capita (of course "Fact" was used rather loosely in the title of that book). Hackers in the Netherlands were introducing regular pulses into…

I wrote about this at length: http://jacquesmattheij.com/wholesale-privacy-violations-in-t... We're definitely not doing well at all on this front and it is getting worse rather than better.

In my opinion, all that is happening with these "anti-privacy laws" is that very old spying practices are becoming codified in law. Nothing will actually change. The spying is already happening, and has been for a long time.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#34

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #6

I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is fundamentally more privacy-friendly than the US, in black-letter terms? US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limite…

I don't think this is the right way to frame the discussion. It's not US versus EU or EU countries against each other.

It's simply people versus their various over-reaching governments.

No country is substantially better than any other, a couple of exceptions exist but those are very small countries that have little or no impact on the world as it is today.

So there's work to do. Everywhere.

The interesting discussion that we could have is what we're going to do about it, not which country currently is marginally better on some front because it will most likely be marginally worse on some other.

There isn't a major country in the western world that isn't guilty of wholesale privacy violations and it isn't a situation that is improving either.

Technology won't fix this.

Poland and Finland are a little bit better than the rest, but only a little bit and they're wide open to their bigger and nastier neighbors.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#35

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

wbhart wrote: post #33

jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote about this at length: http://jacquesmattheij.com/wholesale-privacy-violations-in-t... We're definitely not doing well at all on this front and it is getting worse rather than better.

In my opinion, all that is happening with these "anti-privacy laws" is that very old spying practices are becoming codified in law. Nothing will actually change. The spying is already happening, and has been for a long time.

Yes, the crimes are simply being retro-actively whitewashed and for the future you can expect a lot more of the same especially because it is now legal.

Never mind that these laws are in conflict with just about every right that we as citizens are supposed to have and which we all learn in school should be important to us.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#36

Post by tptacek » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:34 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #34

tptacek wrote: post #6

I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is fundamentally more privacy-friendly than the US, in black-letter terms? US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limite…

I don't think this is the right way to frame the discussion. It's not US versus EU or EU countries against each other. It's simply people versus their various over-reaching governments. No country is substantially better than any other, a couple of exceptions exist but those are very small countries that have little or no impact on the world as it is today. So there's work to do. Everywhere . The interesting discussi…

I think you misunderstand me. I'm not trying to establish a ranking, so much as I'm interested in comparing notes, if only to see which policy approaches work and which don't.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#37

Post by wbhart » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #24

tptacek wrote: post #6

I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is fundamentally more privacy-friendly than the US, in black-letter terms? US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limite…

I'm a European and I honestly have no idea how to answer to the point, but even if the law allows surveillance, there's also the question of resources; even if the laws in my country (Romania) would be worse than those in the US, our intelligence agencies are far, far less capable than the NSA and out-sourcing this is a whole different can of worms and can't ever be justified to the public, even if they are in fact d…

Competence is certainly an important factor. Smaller economies are less able to spy competently. However, incompetent spycraft can become much more invasive, since you know it is happening and it affects you more noticeably.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#38

Post by toyg » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:38 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #34

tptacek wrote: post #6

I know that this is a tricky question to engage with on HN, but is there a major-market country in Europe --- say, from the list of Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Finland --- that is fundamentally more privacy-friendly than the US, in black-letter terms? US privacy laws have loopholes you can drive a truck through. But the limite…

I don't think this is the right way to frame the discussion. It's not US versus EU or EU countries against each other. It's simply people versus their various over-reaching governments. No country is substantially better than any other, a couple of exceptions exist but those are very small countries that have little or no impact on the world as it is today. So there's work to do. Everywhere . The interesting discussi…

> Technology won't fix this.

Yup. This is entirely a political problem. If somebody invented a fundamentally-decentralized, fully-encrypted, totally-anonymous network, it would just be banned outright and we'd be exactly as screwed as before.

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#39

Post by pluma » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:39 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #13

tptacek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parallel construction should be unlawful. The point of the exclusionary rule for evidence is to address the incentives of law enforcement. It's not a recognition that specific pieces of evidence are somehow tainted and untrustworthy. That's a broken premise parallel construction seems to rely on. But then a follow-on question: for the big 3 EU countries, what are the exclusionary principle rules? From a little resear…

Germany: none at all (barring extreme cases), and that's really the overwhelming mainstream opinion of German scholars. Only defenders lament it. The idea is that much harm comes from letting people walk, just because the police did an honest mistake. Or even a willful, outrageous thing. Punishing the police officer should be enough to deter such behavior. I think that it's a reasonable stance, but I'm not invested i…

IMO this is unquestionably a good thing about German law. There have been a few rare cases of "rogue police officers" (there was a case a few years ago where a police officer tortured a suspect because he wanted to save a child, which led to a huge debate about the morality of it all over the media) but the system seems to be good at making those the very rare exception.

Of course evidence still retains its context. An admission made under torture, for example, is likely to be considered inherently invalid because it is extremely unreliable. This is actually a bit ironic (Morissettian irony, not literal irony) if you consider that the US is engaging in systematic torture to extract bullshit intel out of terrorist suspects (whereas reliable evidence provided by a police investigation could be dismissed because of mere formalities).

Re: New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

#40

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:41 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #36

jacquesm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is the right way to frame the discussion. It's not US versus EU or EU countries against each other. It's simply people versus their various over-reaching governments. No country is substantially better than any other, a couple of exceptions exist but those are very small countries that have little or no impact on the world as it is today. So there's work to do. Everywhere . The interesting discussi…

I think you misunderstand me. I'm not trying to establish a ranking, so much as I'm interested in comparing notes, if only to see which policy approaches work and which don't.

Poland does relatively well because the Poles have a very good memory for the times when the communists still ruled and have managed to hold back quite a bit of legislation that would have made privacy intrusions a lot easier.

Something similar was thought to be the case in Germany but it turned out to be mostly a load of nonsense.

NL has a good name but in fact is one of the worst offenders.

Finland is trying really hard but has Russia and Sweden as neighbours and those are running roughshod over the rights of the Finnish citizens.

And so on... it's a sad state of affairs. The biggest sign your country has good privacy is because you're economically not a player, so being 'too small to matter' is one way in which you can differentiate to the point where you can give your citizens some privacy.

But as soon as you're an economically significant entity the fear factor starts to outweigh common sense and privacy goes right out the window, though there will definitely be an attempt to put some lipstick on the pig and make it look like we're all so much safer.