NL national security law to grant automatic permission for targeted surveillance

  > kidnapped a few thousand kids from their families

"Dutch government resigns over child benefits scandal" - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/15/dutch-governme...

Obviously the intelligence services would love to be able to tap phones the way they were able to in the past as well as to read all of your mail.

But in practice the network analysis is as much or even more efficient than reading the mail itself in the investigation phase of a case.

Btw, both lawyers and journalists have quite a few special protections under Dutch law and it isn't clear to me that this proposal would trump those protections, in fact if challenged I would expect the judiciary to affirm that those protections carry the most weight.

It basically reads like this - translation/interpretation errors are mine: Any machine that is compromised by a hacker and that leads to other machines that are also compromised by this hacker are fair game in the process of an investigation.

This ensures that the typical chain of wrapped connections can be pierced, even if some of those systems may well be compromised outside of the owners knowledge. Yes, they are also victims, but their unsecured systems and accounts that are currently under the control of the hacker makes them a part of the investigation.

It's no secret that hackers tend to use many layers of obfuscation in order to reach their ultimate target and this attempts to put a stop to that, with the nice side benefit that if one of the machines en-route is a communications server that other accounts found there are fair game (such as what happened with EncroChat, but there are also other examples).

From what I can see this is all relatively straightforward, and as long as the usual safeguards are in place I do not see a problem with it. Investigators are often laughed at for their lack of digital chops, this doesn't match my own experience, the thing I do see is that they are almost always outmatched because of the constraints placed on their ability to investigate when it comes to digital crime. Some balance should be found here and given a relatively careful weighing of the interests of society and law enforcement I think this proposal really does its best to achieve such a balance. If and when it is abused I fully expect that abuse to be smacked down, as has happened numerous times.

There always will be a tension between LE on the one side and society on the other, LE only has as much power as we collectively grant them and oversight is the ultimate arbiter of what is and what isn't permissible.

As for the context: this is NL we're talking about where such oversight really seems to work well, in other countries that may be a completely different story.

That said, I fail to see how this particular law could be abused in that way, after all, the typical hacking investigation doesn't really know much about the perp until the moment of apprehension. It's after that moment that most of the concern for minorities should kick in, because most of the real life trouble has to do with abusive treatment by the authorities once someone became an identified target. Racial profiling and all kinds of other abuses have been heaped upon minorities time and again, but in the context of hacking suspects prior to apprehension I have no evidence that this has happened.

Usually the problem that this phase of an investigation focuses on (the access to systems that are compromised) is when the hacker is still unknown other than that the authorities are aware they exist.

But I don't doubt that if someone does get arrested and they happen to be a minority that the system will not treat them equally compared to someone who is not a minority. This is a systemic problem that needs addressing, but it isn't directly connected to this law.