It’s all just 1’s and 0’s…

In the last few months there have been a lot of news items in the Netherlands concerning privacy. To name a few:

• the electronic passport
• the electronic patient dossier
• the OV Chip card

These things are mostly being designed with good intentions in mind, to increase security (”stop terrorists!”), to facilitate healthcare, and to facilitate public transportation respectively. In order to achieve these noble goals a lot of information about people is being recorded in there, and it becomes a lot easier to access this data.

You can argue that information such as this was already always being recorded. However, the information was never in such a form that it was so easy to process. More importantly, the data was never automatically linked to a single identity: currently, you can gather information about how many people pass through a certain station, if you try hard, you can perhaps identify and track several persons. With an electronic OV Chip card you are automatically tracked, and this data is stored and archived for some time.

While hearing news about the above things, I am growing more and more concerned about my electronic privacy. The privacy legislation in the Netherlands seems to be lagging behind the (fast) evolving technology, and also relying on self regulation. On the other hand the government is also (ab)using the new possibilities of gathering private data, for example the legislation for saving traffic data. I am also concerned that the government is not looking hard enough at the security issues involved with projects such as the electronic passport or the patient dossier.

While discussing this with friends and colleagues, I learned that I am not the only one with these kind of concerns. It is unfortunate that only last year Bits of Freedom, a big anti-privacy organisation, shut down. At the moment, I am looking into other ways to voice my concern to the right politicians, both for myself, but hopefully also as a bigger group of concerned citizens. Of course I am also going to dig deeper into the issue, and will post my findings here.

A couple of days ago we had a Mayor Referendum in Utrecht. This meant that we, the people, were asked to vote for a new mayor for our city. Well, vote is not the right word, the city counsel would have the ultimate decision, so we were asked to select a mayor. Well, select is not completely the right word, because we could only pick from two preselected candidates. And picking, that was kind of hard too, the two candidates are from the same party (Labour), they look almost the same, and they agreed on the most significant points. This lead to people painting words on the promotional material (taken by eti):

“Lood om oud ijzer”, translates literally to “Trading lead for old iron”, roughly meaning “six or half a dozen”. And when you think about it: the candidates did not even have a poster campaign of their own…

The result of the referendum was kind of predictable, only 9.25% bothered to vote in this charade, and more than 16% of those votes was either blank or invalid.

The most sad thing of this whole situation is that based on this charade, the political parties are now concluding that the people do not care, and that the referendum should be abolished. What a great way to end the national week of democracy.

Big Brother is watching you

This extremely stylish wrapper is for a new chocolate bar. A 100% slave-free chocolate bar. I bought one yesterday and it tastes pretty good.

The idea for this bar came when a Dutch television program “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” (a play on words, translate roughly as the Inspectorate for Values). They did some research on how chocolate is made. They found out a big part of the cacao beans production involves slavery and child labour. They discussed this with some chocolate manufacturers, but these seemed unwilling to change their ways and produce slave free chocolate.

In the end they took matters in their own hands and created their own bar of chocolate; Tony Chocolonely (Audio alert, nice tune though!). Unfortunately, these bars are only available in the Netherlands. I hope that they will start exporting these bars to other countries. Or even better, that the chocolate-makers come to their senses and start producing more of these kinds of bars.

Side-note: one of the journalists of the “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” program even tried to get himself arrested for eating chocolate. Because slavery is a crime, and buying something while knowing that a crime was committed in the process of obtaining this good is illegal (fencing).

He tried to turn himself over to the police, but they rejected him. He tried some other things (even tried dragging himself to court), but so far he has not been able to get punished for his crime.

Looking back at the past few years, I can only conclude that the United States has lost the war on terror. And is losing it more and more. I went to a show of Dolf Jansen in which he said “America is the most terrified country in the world”. I couldn’t agree more. According to him, the breakfast news shows feature a terror-level, showing the odds that there will be a terrorist attack that day.

Another sign that they are completely terrified is the fact that today they tightened security on potential targets. Which is pretty stupid, because it’s not likely that they will have a coordinated attack across the globe and even if they did, you’re not going to stop them from making victims anyway. So the end result is only that the american citizens become more terrified.

Lastly, something that I will have to deal with when I’ll visit the United States in a few months: the tightened security for all foreigners on the border. They are keeping record of each and every visitor to the US:

In order to ensure appropriate safeguards for U.S. national security, the Department of Homeland Security enrolls travelers arriving at U.S. airports and seaports in the US-VISIT program. Enrollment includes collecting a digital photograph and electronic fingerscans of two index fingers. Enrollment takes only seconds and greatly enhances the security of U.S. citizens and visitors to the U.S., facilitates legitimate travel and includes safeguards for the privacy of foreign visitors. (Source, emphasis is mine.)

I don’t have a clue how writing down every single person who enters the country will enhance security. If you want to block known terrorists, you can do that without writing down the information of everybody else. The only thing this achieves is that if it turns out someone is a terrorist, they can dig through this huge database and try to figure out when and where he entered the country. As if that gets you anywhere.

Apparently there are also safeguards for the privacy of visitors; You’re forced to leave a picture, fingerprints, state what you’re coming to do in the US and write down the address you’re staying at. And if you look like a muslim, odds are that you’ll be strip-searched as well. What bit of privacy is there left to safeguard?