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.
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.
We are. For an American or European, there is no problem at all in coming to the Netherlands and living there. What with you being a techie, you'll have a job in twice no time. Nearly the entire population, nowadays, speaks Dutch. Disclaimer: I am of Dutch nationality, although I live in Austria, another EU state (one that does not even make strong encryption a subject of public discussion, but simply and tacitly assumes that strong encryption should be had by all who wish to use it, period).
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
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.
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.