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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.
Meh, the current Dutch governments is one of the most shitty, corrupt and voter hating governments we had in our history, getting the vote with lies and then continuing with their own agenda. The current biggest party in the polls has more than the coalition combined, which has shriveled to a small minority, which is the only reason they didn't resign yet. This government passes law after law to make more spying on their citizens possible, and if it isn't allowed by law, they do it anyway. I wouldn't read too much in this except industrial protection. The text describes two things the government wants: a) it wants strong secure communications for businesses and citizens (*cough*), and b) it wants to be able to break encryption to be able to spy on pedophiles and terrorists. It concludes it cannot achieve b) without violating a), hence only a) is possible now. I suspect this is not to protect our rights but to protect big corps such as Shell (I name Shell as an example because various of our politicians have a Shell background and it is one of the most powerful companies on earth, being spied on by various countries) and for PR for IT. In the meantime our own little version of NSA will be using any exploit and other possibility to continue to invade our privacy. My guess they took some lessons from the Patriot Act, which made security a joke as they for example could go to Apple or MicroSoft and ask for their full cooperation and then Apple or MS couldn't say a thing. This was all very bad for business, and now these companies claim to secure and protect our communications, which is much better PR. I doubt the NSA's possibilities have really dwindled. Don't trust the Dutch government. They cooperate with the US/NSA and made the Netherlands a testbed for their technology.