More powers, less control
Intelligence and security services are allowed to intercept the communications of large groups of people without those people being suspected of anything. The services can exchange this data with foreign services without looking at it first. The Dutch intelligence and security services may hack the devices of service providers and individuals to gain access to a target’s device (the person who is the subject of investigation). In addition, they can gain direct, automated access to databases of government agencies, for example. These are far-reaching powers that seriously invade the privacy of large groups of people.
The Human Rights Board has therefore expressed concerns about this law.
Why is privacy actually important?
Privacy is a vague concept to many people and means something different to many of them. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to explain why privacy is so important. In any case, privacy allows people to be themselves in all the different roles they have in their lives. In doing so, they can decide which personal information they want to share with those around them and which they do not. For example, people generally behave differently toward their parents than toward their friends or partner. Nor do most people want their health insurance company to have insight into their shopping list, or their employer about what they do on weekends.
When the State collects information on a large scale, it can also have a “chilling effect. For example, people no longer dare to demonstrate about an issue, or search online for information about that issue. The large-scale collection of information also violates important rights and guarantees for a well-functioning democracy and rule of law, such as the source protection of journalists and the professional secrecy of lawyers.
Moreover, it is questionable whether the State can safely store all that information. If the security of the data is not guaranteed, the possibility arises that the storage will be hacked, and anyone can do anything with this data.
The Wiv has been adopted by the Senate
The draft bill “Intelligence and Security Services Act” (Wiv) was drafted to replace the Wiv 2002 and was published and opened for Internet consultation on July 2, 2015. Not often did so many responses come to a bill. This shows that there is great concern about the changes this law aims to make. For this reason, a number of amendments were also tabled during discussion of the bill in the House of Representatives. However, only three of these were adopted.
Unfortunately, the bill was also passed by the Senate. A group of students successfully took the initiative to collect signatures to hold a referendum on this law. Citizens in the Netherlands were given the opportunity to cast a vote on this law on March 21, 2018. A special matter, as it is not often that citizens are given a voice in intelligence and security services policies.
The majority of voters (49.4 percent) voted against the current bill. There are proposals to amend the law on a number of points, which will be discussed in the House of Representatives and Senate. However, the government did not want to wait for that and allowed the law to go into effect unchanged on May 1, 2018.
