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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."
Ah good - they've been paying attention and made sure to include the good ol' "child pornography" bit in the list of reasons as justification for breaking into someone else's machine. No bill can be taken seriously without that think-of-the-children element added to it.
they would still be criminals in the other countries. might be troublesome if they plan to travel, while having wire fraud and computer crime charges on their heads...
and well, they're part of the eu so that too, might be unavoidable to remain and not extradite to other eu countries.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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.
If the hack is at such a level that they have system write access (e.g.. to place taps on communications) then the defence case has a much stronger case just by asking whether the the same channel could be use to plant evidence, whether by the law enforcement agency or by a third party.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
Yes, I think EVERYONE slightly miserable is the better alternative, opposed to a few people happy and the rest utterly miserable. The poldermodel (sorry for teh dutch) has its merits.
The law might very well pass. In ordinary circumstances it would likely be shot down in the senate, who are supposed to be more or less apolitical, and normally only pass or strike proposed bills after checking if they are fair, just, in line with other laws and principles, and practical. At the moment however, the governing parties have no majority in the senate, which has opened up the floor for all sorts of political wheeling & dealing, precisely the sort of thing the senate is not supposed to do. The party leader for the Christian Democrats even said it out loud: Quid pro quo, if you want your laws passed. A statement which I think ought to get him ejected from the senate.
So we have a law on the table. A law which goes against our civil liberties, something that many a party in the opposition is not going to like. However the issue of civil liberties, especially "digital" ones, has always been a political bargaining chip that is easily given up if it can be exchanged for something better. When this law lands in the senate, you can be sure that many parties will be interested in supporting it in exchange for something else.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
Sadly, I have to admit he IS just that stupid.
He's been busy trying to kill privacy while turning a dozen bureaucratic police corpses into a single grand paper mill with vast investigative powers and near-zero investigative ability. Percentage of crimes solved is historically low. Priority appears to be crimes that aren't (example: 440 man DAYS burned on a single 4Chan message of a schoolkid threatening to set his school on fire), as well as traffic violations (effectively turning the police into an extended tax collection agency).
Sadly, he's not going anywhere until the next elections.