Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Government Backs Strong Encryption, Condemns Backdoors
blottsie writes: The Netherlands government issued a strong statement on Monday against weakening encryption for the purposes of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The move comes as governments in the United Kingdom and China act to legally require companies to give them access to wide swaths of encrypted Internet traffic. U.S. lawmakers are also considering introducing similar legislation.
It's nice to see a modern, developed nation that actually believes in freedom.
Dutch legislation is not really relevant, I would say. If most software is coming from the US, including OS from Microsoft, Apple and Google, how are you supposed to enforce adequate encription if the US mandates weaker versions? Is it going to be the GNU/Linux on the Dutch Desktop during 2016?
Are you accepting new residents?
Probably because they have a voted in a more representative government instead of the USA/UK version of democracy where you get presented with a list of rich people you can choose from.
Most government leaders are EXTREMELY ignorant about technology, but they know technology is important, so they pretend they know things.
If encryption is outlawed, it will just be hidden. There will be large images with messages in the grey areas, for example.
At a minimum, '5 eyes' countries will lay down the law when the time comes. In the meantime, how much of the data cloud, or the world's information is in the Netherlands?
"... how much of the data cloud, or the world's information is in the Netherlands?"
After encryption is outlawed everywhere else, all of it.
All the endorsement of encryption is worth nothing ing until the lawful intercept laws are of the books.
How come steganography wasn't used to circumvent strong cryptography bans in the early 1990's?
So, imagine a situation like this:
Netherlands REQUIRES strong encryption on all internet services
US REQUIRES weak encryption on all internet services
Now, no one in the US can use the internet to talk to anyone in the Netherlands.
*** FACEPALM ***
This "letter from the government" comes only weeks after they passed a law legalizing hacking by the police. It means nothing.
Also, this letter is available only in MS Word format and LibreOffice refuses to open it. The Dutch government is a bunch of clueless computer illiterate idiots.
0x or or snor perron?!
Then they will be tracking everything trying to root them out.
Who watches the watchers ?
Every day I read about another reason on why I'm proud to be Dutch....
The USA had a strong crypto export ban in the early 90's. There were no laws against using strong encryption, only about shipping crypto implementations. In practice, it meant that people in Europe had to download Netscape from a site outside the USA.
Whose to say that it wasn't?
Just create a software version of Enigma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine) with eg. 20 wheels. Also, create a matrix which contains how the wheels should turn. You can create thousands of wheel turning patters. Voila, unbreakable encryption without using a sufficiently long one time pad.
Of course, the initial configuration has to be sent somehow (eg. via courier or other conventional ways which 3-letter agencies seem to forget) and the encoding/decoding machine should never be connected to the internet.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
I complained to my MP (in the UK, where our PM has publicly stated he'd like back doors all over the place) and got a response which essentially said "we invest in strong encryption, we don't advocate weakening encryption at all. However, we do want tech companies to give us access to data when we ask for it".
In other words - it's all about double-speak. To turn this into slashdot friendly words: "we come in peace. shoot to kill".
Strong statements are all well and good, but until they also legislate to say (to tech companies) "it's okay to store data in encrypted form that you don't have the keys for", they're not really any different from the other countries of the western world that are keen to snoop on our every move. They're less in-bed with the Americans than we Brits are, so hopefully not quite as pervasive as we are, but apart from scale and efficiency, not that far different.
Considering the Netherlands has the most wiretaps per capita of any country in the world this seems rather odd.
..and, of course, as you say: if they succeed in destroying any usefulness of encryption, criminal-types will just find other ways to hide or obfuscate what they're doing, just like always. It's like word filters on discussion forums; determined people will just find ways to say 'fuck', 'shit', 'cock', etc., without actually using the words, and they'll change up what they're doing to keep ahead of the wordfilters faster than the wordfilters can be updated. It's a negative-sum game in either case but they don't seem to understand that -- or just don't care, or worse, they're really wanting to spy on honest citizens more than anything else.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Dutch government makes a strongly worded statement with the hopes that someone will notice that they exist, and jump to the inaccurate conclusion that they are somewhat relevant.
When this story hit ./, all three Dutch government employees celebrated with high fives and a few seconds of hearty laughter.
I approve of the Netherlands government. Whatever happened to the United States? Where did we go wrong? Why do European countries get better, and we get closer to North Korea?
As a dutch native, I can say that the wording was typically weasel wording. Especially the part where the minister, who only a few months ago was openly complaining about encryption, now says in the conclusion part of the official document: > Derhalve is het kabinet van mening dat het op dit moment niet wenselijk is om beperkende wettelijke maatregelen te nemen ten aanzien van de ontwikkeling, de beschikbaarheid en het gebruik van encryptie binnen Nederland. Translation: Therefore, the government believes that it is _currently_ not appropriate to take restrictive legal measures against the development, availability and use of encryption within the Netherlands. The translation was done by Google, and seems to be very adequate, please zoom in on the wording "currently". If that's the conclusion, I wouldn't call it "strong" wording at all, which Slashdot says the minister used. Building in backdoors isn't time related, or currently not a good idea -- it's inherently bad, not just today.
This is one of those case where you're almost obligated to lie as a politician, or at least use weasel words. If you strongly support unbreakable backdoors, you get the police, intelligence services and such saying you're crippling their work against terrorism and crime, that you're naive and irresponsible. If you strongly support backdoors, you get all kinds of civil rights groups and others saying you're an authoritrian, totalitarian creep that is making the terrorists win by taking our freedoms away. And that you can't stop open source encryption, so you're just playing security theater and not being in touch with reality.
What you get is a muddy gray answer saying we're working on a way to let you eat your cake and have it too, please don't stop voting for us either way. Another example is gun control, there's no magic bullet to tell terrorists and school shooters from ordinary people. But if you hear a politican talk, they'll take away the guns from the "bad guys" and not the "good guys" all the same. Or that don't want the war on drugs with hard enforcement nor legalization and free weed, but some vague better treatment of addiction rather than punishment that is trying to score the vote of both the concerned teen mom and recreational drug users alike.
Here's the thing I've noticed after talking to quite a few people about politics, many have much clearer reasons why they're voting against someone than for someone. One burning issue where you really, really can't accept voting for that guy. So politicians tend to avoid making those kind of statements, trying to push the kind of politics that'll make you vote for them and doing damage control by being so bland as possible on the rest. After all this is a race against other politicians, it's not like they need a strong position on everything. What's important are the few issues they manage to make stick, the babble is quickly forgotten.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
summary: We don't have a clue how to weaken encryption and therefore decided to make not weakening encryption our goal, so we we could pad each other on the back for reaching this wonderful goal without actually doing shit.
We must destroy encryption, in order to save our citizens!
What is wrong with the Dutch? We really must have a meeting and get them back on message! /SpyAgencies
Have gnu, will travel.
Bravo to The Netherlands for taking this stand. I mean that sincerely. They will face an uphill battle however.
I complained to my MP (in the UK, where our PM has publicly stated he'd like back doors all over the place) and got a response which essentially said "we invest in strong encryption, we don't advocate weakening encryption at all. However, we do want tech companies to give us access to data when we ask for it".
In other words - it's all about double-speak
I'm not sure. Were I running a tech company I would interpret the above as meaning that we should turn over the data. The encrypted data.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
After somebody pointed out the problems with rot13 encryption, the Dutch settled for double rot13 (rot26) encryption.
Nice6
The Dutch only condemn the backdoors that they did not pay for!
Ha Ha
Firstly, the minister perpetuates the rumor of encryption being relevant in the paris attacks: "De recente aanslagen in Parijs, waarbij mogelijk gebruik is gemaakt van versleuteling van de communicatie door de terroristen" which translates to: "the recent attacks in Paris, where encryption was possibly used in the terrorists communications".
Secondly, the minister hints at following the recent American idea of asking IT companies to voluntarily use encryption in such a way that the government can still acess communications: His statement translates to: "In carrying out their duties, security agencies are partially dependent on cooperation with suppliers of IT products and services. Given this dependence, consultation with these suppliers is needed regarding effective provisioning of data in the case of use by mallicious parties, considering everyone's role and responsibilites as well as the legal frameworks." (5th paragraph 4th page)
At least I know who to sue if my identity gets stolen, or are we meant to hope that only benevolent hactivists find the backdoors?
This is one of those case where you're almost obligated to lie as a politician, or at least use weasel words.
In 2016 (this year, actually - wow), I'll be running for the Senate in the State of Maine. Maine's a pretty small place with very little power and, if elected, I'll be a Senator from a district that is pretty well off the beaten path - even by Maine's standards. In other words, I'll be completely powerless.
Which means I get to say that I am 100% against back doors in encryption, software of any kind (without owner's consent), and don't actually care that it makes the police have to work more diligently. The rights of the innocent outweigh the risks of the accused. It the police want data they can get a warrant. If they data is encrypted they can use all the tech they want to use to decrypt that data, and only that data, after having taken it as evidence by lawful means.
So yeah, I'm not actually gonna be entrusted with anything important but at least I get to keep my dignity.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I knew there was another reason I moved the Netherlands other than all the other reasons, they still understand the concept of privacy & more practically they will not be in power forever and exempt from the tyranny of the government overreach er I mean "freedom"....
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."
It makes the assumption that the Dutch government will actually obey the laws that apply to them, I've been busy with freedom of information requests to the Dutch government to find out about scandalous decision making at local government level. A wide ranging request was send in and received the results. A large pile of material but absolutely nothing regarding the decision making in question. The minutes of every meeting on the subject was refused and as I said there's nothing about national security in the request. They simply refuse to comply! What do you do? If the Dutch government can so easily break the law on quite small (But important to us) issues they won't give a flying fuck about anything they consider important.