Dutch government wants spying on all citizens

This video says about itself:

‘Orwell’s 1984 a fairytale compared to reality’: Snowden delivers Xmas message

25 December 2013

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has delivered his ‘Alternative Christmas Message’ via a British TV channel. The whistleblower called for an end to mass spying by governments, stating that a child born today will have “no conception of privacy.” Read more here.

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands:

New ‘snooping law’: Anyone can be hacked

Today, 02:48

The Dutch secret services will be able to hack also innocent civilians with a new law, if they can reach their targets in this way. This is clear from the text of the new Law on Intelligence and Security. The Volkskrant daily has found the not yet disclosed legal text and has shared it with the NOS. …

Interestingly, the government had asked the Privacy and Identity Lab, a collaboration of two universities and TNO, for research into the new law, but it has ignored their advice on that issue. The P. I. Lab writes that hacking “citizens who are not suspects of any crime” goes too far. The study talks about “unacceptable privacy risks.”

Although the government acknowledges that these are powers violating civil rights, they still go ahead with their plans. ….

Civil rights organization Bits of Freedom, which has analyzed the law, does not like it. “Someone has not done anything, but suddenly the secret services do invade his device,” said Ton Siedsma of that organization. It can involve smartphones, tablets or laptops, but also new types of smart devices such as watches, refrigerators and cars.

Mass surveillance

Also the power of large-scale surveillance remains in the new law largely unchanged in spite of criticism by Amnesty International, the Board for the Protection of Human Rights and businesses. Two weeks ago, the government still said it would satisfy the concerns. ….

The legal text shows that the AIVD and its military counterpart, MIVD, may still do mass surveillance extensively. …

It is clear from the explanation of the new law that the coming years there will come a snooping network with four major locations. The government will pay the cost of this mass surveillance, 15 million next year to 35 million in 2019. …

The government, of course, will pay these new costs of spying with taxpayers’ money. Meaning the overwhelmingly non-criminal taxpayers will pay to destroy their own privacy. Dutch taxpayers, of course, do not include the millionaires and billionaires whose money is in offshore tax havens with a little help of the Panama Papers‘ Mossack Fonseca or similar tax dodging enablers.

The Dutch secret services with this law will be able to cooperate better with other secret services, says the government.

Critics fear effects on privacy. Thus, opposition party D66 is afraid of a dragnet. Telecom companies also reacted critically, as do business organisations SME Netherlands and VNO-NCW.