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Comment by daenney | Hacker News Reader

It also applies to all victims of hackers, irrespective of whether the victims themselves are supposedly criminals or not. So if you get hacked, then suddenly the government can hack you too.

No amount of hypothetical "it could also be used against criminals" balances out the bonkers overreach this represents.

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In theory yes, but in practice this hasn't happened and I really don't expect it to happen. I've seen enough of LE in NL up close to have an idea of how it all hangs together and this article definitely has a point: the law should be worded more carefully but at the same time it isn't going to get out of hand the way the article would have you believe. Plenty of oversight here and judges that take conflicting laws fairly seriously (such as the GDPR, but also laws regarding the gathering of evidence and such).

NL has lots of problems, but lack of judicial oversight over both the police and the intelligence services isn't one of them, in fact you could make a pretty good argument that the degree of oversight actually hinders going after tech savvy criminals. But better too much than too little. This law won't change that by much as far as I can see.

"Going dark" is a scam - https://crimesciencejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11... for instance found that there was no difference in conviction rate for cases involving E2EE encryption vs those that didn't in the Netherlands. The government just wants the halcyon period of surveillance from late 1900s to the early 2000s back but these supposed tech savvy criminals almost never turn out to exist.

That's a different context entirely.

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.

You say "this hasn't happened" and "plenty of oversight", but the president of the review committee just resigned because of this. And she isn't allowed to inform the public nor parliament of what has already been happening, even before this change. As in, examples of the type of surveillance already happening have been redacted from the annual report of the review committee [0]. The annual report was specifically made to omit operational details and only inform of the general picture, but parts have been declared state secret. The now ex-president of the review committee stated she could not inform parliament because she did not want to go to prison for 15 years [1].

0: https://www.tweedekamer.nl/kamerstukken/detail?id=2023Z05165...

1: https://debatdirect.tweedekamer.nl/2023-03-30/binnenlandse-z...

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