WIV
As you may have heard five students started a petition for a referendum about the so-called “sleepwet”. This is a new law of the Dutch government that will be implemented the 1st of January. This law will give the intelligence services of the Netherlands (AIVD and MIVD) numerous new powers to obtain information about terrorists and other potential criminals. The petition has now more than 300.000 signatures which is enough for a referendum. So, what is this law all about, and should you be in favour- or against it?
The new law is according to the AIVD and MIVD necessary because the current law from 2002 is outdated. Both intelligence services now have very limited capabilities to track someone’s internet traffic and the new law will fix that. It will allow the AIVD to tap enormous amounts of data and then filter the data to get the relevant information related to the search query. The AIVD says that it needs all this data to track and stop potential terrorists.
However, a side effect of acquiring data this way is that private information of innocent individuals will also end-up on the servers of the AIVD where it could be stored for up to three years. There is now way of preventing this. One could at the most encrypt the content of their messages to guarantee some privacy. Of course, it will not be possible for the intelligence services to place taps everywhere they see fit. They will need to permission from the minister before placing the tap and a special commission checks if the request is within the boundaries of the law. Unfortunately, this special commission says that it will have a hard time performing this task as the law in question is vaguely worded. They state that “to be effective in supervising one needs a clearly defined legal framework, this is currently not the case.”
In my opinion this is a problem that needs to be addressed and the reason why this referendum is so important. It will give lawmakers another chance to state explicitly what the boundaries of the law are which in turn will help with the oversight of the intelligence services.
the “WIV”
20
October
2017
When I first heard about this new regulation, I can say we shared the same opinion and I was in favor of a referendum. This vague law may never exist in such a well regulated democracy. But after listening to a debate about the sleepwet in ‘De Balie’ I slightly changed my opinion.
I still think the idea of the law should be changed. Are you OK with the fact that the data that is taped may be shared with foreign countries? And worse: with foreign countries that doesn’t have to stick to our privacy regulation? I am not sure if you knew this part of the law.
Additionally, what do you think of the data controlling part? In the way the law is set up now, the Dutch politics will execute this ‘job’. I think this is ridiculous as well and should be executed by an independent third party who has nothing to do with regulation.
All in all, I still think the idea of the ‘sleepwet’ is initially good, but I am not sure if this the above items will change when we will come to a referendum. Therefore I hope the whole law will be dismissed and will be set up in smaller, better controlled laws.
(here you can see the whole debate about the ‘sleepwet’)
https://www.debalie.nl/agenda/podium/de-sleepwet%3A-het-einde-van-je-privacy%3F/e_9783076/p_11770000/