Only this Wednesday, the Netherlands Senate passed a new law that expands the government’s targeted mass surveillance powers that allow them to force service providers in the country to give up information on users. This new law goes into effect on January 1st, 2018.
“It increases the intel agency’s ability to wiretap, to hack and to work with organizations to volunteer them information. Wiretapping can now be less targeted (think dragnet), hacking could also target close relations of targets. Voluntary informers could also be companies rather than individuals (e.g. ISPs giving easy access to data),” reported Martijn Grooten to The Register.
While in the past authorities and law enforcement could already sanction wiretaps with ministerial permission, the new law removes much of the formal boundaries that held power in check. The new law removes much of the permissions required to tap and log data, and the law even allows the authorities to collect data and information from friends and families of potential suspects. Additionally, information collected can be stored for up to 3 years and can, under law, be shared with other countries.
As with all new powerful privacy laws being enacted in countries around the world, critics worry that the law is too broad, and encompasses too many possibilities without enough checks and balances. Nico van Eijk, a professor at the University of Amsterdam worries that this is a law with “too many open ends”.
Other organizations like the Netherlands’ Association of Journalists intend to challenge the new laws and its certain other human rights groups will find issues with the new laws as well.
Here at TorGuard, we believe that privacy and encryption is important for all users around the world. These new surveillance laws always want to have as much power as possible, but as we’ve seen recently in the US–when surveillance powers become too powerful, more often than not, someone messes up and leaks data or powerful security tools that can have drastic negative effects on privacy, anonymity, and security worldwide.
Due to overreaching and overly extensive security policies everywhere around the world, it’s time you take your security and online privacy into your own hands by using a VPN.
