New law proposal makes The Netherlands privacy-unfriendly

It's a fair criticism. However I think it's too early to be telling startups to stay away from the Netherlands. Both because the new law may be prevented yet, and these types of laws are occurring simultaneously across most of the developed world. I'm not sure where a startup would flee to, to avoid them.

I might take the opposite tact here. I'd argue instead that startups should feel perfectly comfortable making the Netherlands their home, for all the positive reasons, and they should all focus on slaying these bad qualities. The Netherlands only has 17 million people, it's still very possible to have your voice heard. A focused group of startups can probably still make a difference.

Without getting specific to particular startups - obviously the best country is the one where you have a large market -which are the best countries for startups?

In terms of availability of funding, legal ability to onboard foreign workers, IP rights, general digital-friendly legislation, and so on? I'm only really aware of the US & larger EU countries, presumably there are also great opportunities further afield?

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 limited research I've done suggest to me that that's true of virtually all western democracies, and that the loopholes in other countries can be even larger and less transparent. My impression of France for instance, is that there isn't a major distinction between what the French government can do on its own soil to combat terrorism versus what it can do abroad; that's probably not true of the US.

I'm interested in facts and non-emotional analysis; the "interesting" discussion we can have about this topic. Obviously a lot of people bring priors to it about the evils of the NSA or NSA/USG's corrupting influence on other countries. I'm prepared to stipulate that (believe it or not, I'm not that far from most HN readers on these topics, ideologically!) if we can boil things down to the raw facts.

So does Dutch law actually recognize the UN's International Covenant[1] ? While a country can be a signatory to the covenant, it is just a popularity stunt until there are locally enacted laws which provide for enforcement of its provisions. It isn't like UN Peacekeepers are going to come parachuting in to your rescue.

Also the comment about Mass surveillance is incorrect. While it may not have found any terrorism suspects there is ample evidence that it has impacted drug smuggling (as implemented in the US) where the DEA was fed information that it had to lie about where it got it. While I find the whole parallel construction thing a huge violation of civil liberties (and generally should be illegal) it is pretty clear that mass surveillance did identify a number of drug operations. So in that regard it "works". It might be better to say that it hasn't been shown to be an effective tool against terrorism.

[1] http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx

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 research last year, I know that the exclusionary rule in the UK is more complicated than it is in the US.