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Domain: minbuza.nl

Stories and comments across the archive that link to minbuza.nl.

Comments · 11

  1. Re:Why? by lamare · · Score: 1 · on EU Sues Sweden, Demands ISP Data Retention
    I'm sorry, but you are mistaken. The way the EU currently operates is as a *political* union. The EU does make laws, it makes "directives", which are basically *political* agreements amongst the member states. These *political* agreements are then subsequently "translated" into national law by national *politics* and only then become law.

    At this moment, the EU has no legal authority over the member states. The "authority" it has is purely *political* and therefore the only means the EU has to force memberstates into compliance are *political* means, *not* legal means.

    It may be so what I quoted does not one-to-one apply to Sweden, but the Dutch constitution also allows power to be transferred to international bodies. However, that does not imply that that already happened. The fact of the matter is that at this moment legal authority has *not* been transferred from the EU memberstates to the EU yet. And that is exactly why we "need" a "European Constitution" aka "Lisbon Treaty".

    The most important change the Lisbon Treaty will bring, is *legal supremacy* of the EU over the member states as well as the establishment of legal federation, a super-state, a supreme state *above* the member states.

    Another expert on this topic is Prof. Antony Coughlan ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Coughlan ).

    This is what he has to say, from an Irish point of view, which is of course no different from the Dutch or Swedish point of view: http://www.teameurope.info/node/232

    "1) Lisbon makes the EU Constitution superior to the Irish Constitution in all areas of EU law: The Irish Constitution would still remain, but "Declaration 17 concerning Primacy", which is attached to the Lisbon Treaty, makes clear that EU law would have primacy over and be superior to the Irish Constitution and laws in any case of conflict between the two. It does this by referring to the case-law of the EU Court of Justice, which over the years has asserted the principles of (a) the superiority of EU law, (b) its direct effect in the territory of its Member States, even if it is not formally put through their National Parliaments, and (c) the constitutional character of EU law. EU law and national law deal with different areas and matters, as is normal in Federal States like the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Australia. The EU now makes the majority of our laws each year. The Lisbon Treaty would give the EU the power to make supranational laws that are binding on us in many new areas - see points 7 and 9 below - and would take that power away from the Irish Dail and from Irish citizens who elect the Dail."

    So, how does the Lisbon treaty do this again? "It does this by referring to the case-law of the EU Court of Justice".

    Now what case-law might that be? Remember what De Vries said?

    "It has really started in 1964, when the European Court of Justice ruled in the case Costa/Enel. [...] This incorrect and in my eyes above all unauthorized judgement [...] has led to [...] the misconception that the European law from itself has primacy above the national Dutch law".

    So, there you have it. Two experts saying the same thing.

    And not only that, this is also what is being said by the Dutch Council of State, an advisory board to the Dutch Government. Its advice about the a.o. the difference between the EU Constitution and the Lisbon treaty can be found in Dutch at: http://www.minbuza.nl/binaries/kamerbrieven-bijlagen/2007/09/1316die-bijlage2.pdf

    It contains a most interesting phrase: "Ook wordt niet langer expliciet de voorrang van het recht van de EU in de verdragstekst gecodificeerd". "Also, the supremacy of EU law is no longer explicitly codified in the treaty text."

    Now, why oh why would there be

  2. Re:"soon-to-be Leader of the Free World" by Jamie's+Nightmare · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Obama's "ZuneGate"

    Many of the freedoms you list are not universally permitted/denied (alcohol, abortion,divorce). Also, maybe you missed the news when your government decided to ban the sale of magic mushrooms. But, I'm sure you're too busy to read the news, what with all your travels around the world via your Visa trumping Dutch citizenship. *cough*bullshit*cough*

    It's also interesting that you claim you don't need a Visa to visit 99% of the planet, yet those who want to visit YOU, do need one.

  3. Re:Sigh by Ciarang · · Score: 1 · on Mayor Orders Mandatory Evacuation of New Orleans

    Never? Or 1953? http://www.minbuza.nl/history/en/1953,1953.html

  4. Re:You lived below sea level by identity0 · · Score: 2, Interesting · on Rewiring (and Unwiring) New Orleans

    What I don't understand is how you can be such a huge, rich country, claim to be the greatest country on Earth, and yet you can't do what the Dutch have done with a quarter of their country to one city on your coast? Heck, even the Italians managed to do it for over a millenia - Venice was founded some time between 400 and 800 AD.

    Why can't America do it right in one city?

  5. Re:Typical of Australia by Captain_Chaos · · Score: 1 · on Australian Parliament Approves Email Snooping

    I make no claims as to the accuracy of the translation, of course.

    Here is the official English translation from the ministry of foreign affairs.

  6. Re:From the captain-obvious department by EccentricAnomaly · · Score: 1 · on Too Many People in Nature's Way

    but New Orleans is unique in that after a disaster is over IT'S GOING TO STAY UNDER WATER, BECAUSE IT'S UNDER SEA LEVEL. It's a stupid place to build a city

    Yeah, it the only place where a large population lives below sea level.

    dumbass

  7. Re:Water City by Paul+Jakma · · Score: 5, Informative · on 9 Weeks to Pump Out New Orleans?

    While they don't get "Hurricanes" per se, they do get what is called an Orkan, which is pretty much the same.

    That would be because "Orkaan" is the dutch word for "Hurricane".

    And no, the Netherlands doesn't really get that many hurricanes. The Netherlands greatest problems with flooding tend actually not to come from the sea but from the Rijn, one of the biggest rivers in Europe, which exits to the sea via the Netherlands. It floods regularly.

    The way the dutch cope with this is through dijks ('dykes' in english?) and, more recently, through controlled flooding: as it's simply become impossible to fully contain the Rijn, the thinking is now to let it flood as much as possible into farmland and hence reduce the strain on dijks around more important inhabited lands.

    The atlantic threat is there too, while not near hurricanes in power, atlantic storms are far more frequent. It seems easier to contain though. There are barriers in place around the entrances to the Zeeland tidal estuaries, which you can see in the map the previous poster gave as blue lines, and there's a truly gigantic floating set of metal arms, which are rotated into place and then sunk, to protect the mouth of the Rotterdam waterway. (To consider how huge these must be, Rotterdam Europoort, the busiest shipping port in the *world* apparently, can just be seen in part to the right in the picture above, with a ferry sailing down that large channel..)

  8. Re:Water City by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative · on 9 Weeks to Pump Out New Orleans?
    But the Dutch have had way more fatalities due to flooding:
    from Wikipedia:

    In years past, the Dutch coastline has changed considerably due to human intervention and natural disasters. Most notable in terms of land loss are the 1134 storm, which created the archipelago of Zeeland in the southwest, and the 1287 storm, which killed 50,000 people and created the Zuyderzee (now dammed in and renamed the IJsselmeer - see below) in the northwest, giving Amsterdam direct access to the sea. The St. Elisabeth flood of 1421 and the mismanagement in its aftermath destroyed a newly reclaimed polder, replacing it with the 72 km Biesbosch tidal floodplains in the southcentre. The most recent parts of Zeeland were flooded during the North Sea Flood of 1953 and 1,836 people were killed, after which the Delta Plan was executed.

    Here is a map of Netherlands showing the areas under sea level:
  9. Re:Hmm... by Norbert+de+Jonge · · Score: 0 · on Kursk Finally Lifted
    > Are the Dutch members of NATO?

    Of course they are (the country was a founding member of NATO) and they will support the US wherever necessary. They just recently helped with "Operation Essential Harvest" and played an active role in Bosnia and Kosovo. Read more about the response of the Dutch government to the terror attacks in the US on the website of their Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

    With best regards,

    Norbert de Jonge
    http://norbertdejonge.sourceforge.net

  10. Echelon: (non?)existent as it is, should you care? by lptp · · Score: 1 · on The EU Report on the Echelon System
    Echelon - Should you care?

    For more then a decade, assumption has been that the Echelon network actually exists, and there's been lots of discussion about that. I'll save you another comment on it, and leave that to the European Commission's investigation team. One of the websites mentioned in a previous comment (New Scientist) states: "A new European Parliament document confirms the existence of a secretive US-led communications surveillance network, known as Echelon."

    What's far more concerning (IMHO) and pops up in the discussions far less often, is how relevant a network like Echelon might be. Therefore, let's have a look at the technical difficulties one would have to overcome. Try to imagine being the 'big bad board' (BBB) implementing a system that would monitor all the network traffic for, say, a company with 10000 employees on five locations throughout the United States (or, if you prefer, Europe, the Far- or Middle East, Africa...).
    Our first challenge would be deciding what network traffic is worth monitoring. Of course we're going to intercept all e-mail sent by our employees! Who knows what evil plans they're making up to throw over the BBB! On the other hand, we're proud to have the best educated employees in the region, so they're probably not stupid enough to use our own mail server for their evil purposes. They're likely using a hotmail account or the likes, so we're going to monitor all internet traffic on our networks too. In fact, we'd better watch all network traffic other than the use of our network shares and databases! So this thing is going to take up a lot of computing power!
    Now, we can't possibly install the hardware needed for our Big Brother Watchdog on every site so we'll have to tap into network traffic at all five locations, bundle it and send it to our headquarters, where the BBB will be pleased to see all the hardware and extra cabling installed. Jeez, that'll be a lot of network traffic flowing to our headquarters from now on!
    And of course, let's not ignore the faxes, telephone lines and the likes.

    Talking about 'all the hardware' ... one of the things still growing more and more popular are peer-to-peer networks and combining the computing power of numerous machines to achieve nearly impossible investigation goals. Some examples are the "United Devices Cancer Research Project", the Seti@home project, and the diverse Distributed.Net projects. Please, do have a look at some of these and consider the tasks they're working at. Trying to fit a molecular structure to a cancer helix, calculating the numerous combinations of a 21 mark Golomb ruler, or -possibly the best comparison- sifting through an incredible amount of interstellar radio noise to sift out signals sent out by ALF's (Artificial Life Forms as seen by US television - No, I'm not talking about the Jerry Springer show here): These tasks are the likes of what the Echelon network is supposed to do (i.e. filter enormous amounts of data, looking for certain keywords, possibly even decoding encrypted messages).
    Now look again! But this time, try to perceive the number of computers taking part in these projects, the total computing power involved, and the time needed to acquire the ultimate goal: a possible match on a cancer cure, the radio signal we wanted or an optimal Golomb Ruler. Quoting some of these statistics:
    • Distributed.Net, OGR project: Our current combined OGR network speed is 182.49 Giga-nodes per second
    • UD Cancer Research Project: 609,178 devices, 104,791,203 hours total CPU time
    • Seti@home: 3044035 users, 673412.833 years of computer time
    Looking at these statistics, let's reconsider the amount of computing power we'll need to sift through all this network traffic... Yeah, sure, even as a European from a pretty open-minded and at times unbelievably tolerant country (I'm talking about the Netherlands here), I do believe that any government (1) has the money to make sure they get the best technology available to date, (2) can make sure this technology will be available to them alone by issuing laws accordingly and (3) will use this technology to whatever purpose they want. Even with this 'knowledge' in mind, it's hard to perceive the amount of equipment that would be needed to filter and accumulate all the data on the internet, telephone networks, etcetera.
    And that's just accumulating the data - not even processing it yet! Looking back to our mass-computing statistics, and how little you can actually achieve in a certain amount of time, it dare say that, even with the most advanced linguistic filtering techniques and disregarding all non-human communication, it's impossible to sift through the amount of data we're talking about when it comes to Echelon. And off course, since we're all a least a little geeky here, we wouldn't be using ASCII for our secret communications, would we?
    Too bad for our BBB, but we simply can't put up enough computer power to do the monitoring we had in mind here. So as a company, we better just stick to checking our employers' e-mail...

    There's one more technical hurdle I'd like to point out here. When you intercept network traffic at the source, for instance listening to a single segment of a network, it's pretty easy to reassemble single-user communication from the entire data stream. But on the internet, thanks to the wonderful original design of the network, we can't be sure that all our data is taking the same path from client to host and vice versa. In fact, TCP/IP makes sure our data is split into little fragments, and that each fragment on it's own will be routed to it's destination. One of these routes may be a copper cable on the seabed, another will be fibre, the third might even take a little space trip bouncing to and from a satellite. Now: how to intercept and reassemble ALL that?

    In the EU (European Union - subst: UE, L'Union européenne) report the point I'm trying to make is stated as follows:
    "Today, various media are available for all forms of intercontinental communication (voice, fax and data). The scope for a worldwide interception system is restricted by two factors:
    • restricted access to the communication medium
    • the need to filter out the relevant communication from a huge mass of communications taking place at the same time."
    Some of the arguments mentioned above are also (albeit briefly) illustrated in the report. The (EU rapporteur's) assumption that the ability to analyse spoken language using a computer is still very limited may be naïve, the restrictions mentioned in the report ("the scope for filtering out is restricted by other factors: the ultimate capacity of the computers, the language problem and, above all, the limited number of analysts who can read and assess filtered messages.") remain intact.

    Concluding, I think we shouldn't be worried about BBG (Big Brother Governments / Big Bad Governments) listening in on our communications. Nevertheless, I support the EU rapporteur's conclusion: it's always a good idea to encrypt messages that you don't want to go public. Even if we disregard Echelon, all you need is a single geek on your network trying to get out some interesting information...

    Paranoia, anyone? Tell us!

  11. Re:There are sites that require IE by Tijn · · Score: 1 · on IE 5.5 Tracking Default Bookmarks

    Okay, it doesn't render in NS (at least 4.7/Linux). But it does in Lynx, and doesn't choke on JunkBuster.
    If you really want to see a messed up page:
    Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
    It won't even load if your browser/proxy doesn't identify itself as Netscape/IE > 4.0!