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Dutch Bill Seeks To Give Law Enforcement Hacking Powers
An anonymous reader writes "The Dutch government today presented a draft bill that aims to give law enforcement the power to hack into computer systems — including those located in foreign countries — to do research, gather and copy evidence or block access to certain data. Law enforcement should be allowed to block access to child pornography, read emails that contain information exchanged between criminals and also be able to place taps on communication, according to a draft bill published Thursday and signed by Ivo Opstelten, the Minister of Security and Justice. Government agents should also be able to engage in activities such as turning on a suspect's phone GPS to track their location, the bill said. Opstelten announced last October he was planning to craft this bill."
Really no difference to Chinese state-sponsored hackers. For anybody else, these people are just an (advanced) persistent threat, as they will not go to jail if identified, at least not in their own country. Treat them no different than any other criminal hackers from a different country.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Cool, so now they can program flashy new code and release it under a free software license. Perhaps even do some hardware hacks, like make your cell phone a bat detector!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)
Exactly. When governments give themselves freedoms while taking the same freedoms away from their citizens, something is wrong. Unfortunately this seems to be de rigueur, lately.
Exactly. When governments give themselves freedoms while taking the same freedoms away from their citizens, something is wrong.
You mean like the ability to tax people?
It has been argued that one of the real reasons behind this bill is the lack of resources with the police to follow-up all the now already available means of tracking down offenders. Appearantly, it is much cheaper to use hacking tools than to do some old style research and detective work. Or at least that is the impression given by those marketing these hacking tools.