Eveline Lubbers on 26 Jun 2000 12:34:25 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Dutch parliament will hold hearing on Echelon |
There is an interesting development in the Netherlands regarding Echelon. In the last two years members of parliament have asked the ministry of Internal Affairs en Justice about Echelon on a regular basis. In all cases the questions were answered in the most uninformative manner possible. The ministers diminished all reports on Echelon as 'only open-source' and found further investigation useless as the existence of the interception could not be 'detected'. Last week Bits of Freedom and buro Jansen & Janssen wrote article in the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad about the need for an investigation by the Dutch parliament. We argued that it was useless for members of parliament to ask any more questions to ministers about Echelon if then are not answered in a serious way. An investigation is the only way to go now. Much to our surprise, only 4 days later, the Dutch Green party managed to get a proposal through the parliament committee on Justice to hold a hearing on Echelon. It is scheduled for September. It is a very small step and not yet an investigation. But for a country that is so loyal to the US and the UK in its foreign policy, it is a step that did not seem possible in the past. The discussion in the European parliament is having quite some impact in the feelings among Dutch parliamentarians on Echelon. As the European Justice ministers just met to discuss 'counter-measures against economic espionage through interception', this might be the moment for other privacy watchers in Europe to press for hearings or investigations in their national assemblies. article in NRC (in Dutch) http://www.nrc.nl/W2/Lab/Echelon/000616.html Dossier Cryptografie (in Dutch, will be available in English end of July) http://www.xs4all.nl/~respub/crytpo Eveline Lubbers buro Jansen & Janssen Maurice Wessling Bits of Freedom _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold