Aside from the fact that NL is a trading nation and thus has a disproportionate amount of people living and working outside of the Netherlands and thus having multiple nationalities, it makes it seem like having the Dutch nationality is like being a member of some kind of exclusive club. What nonsense! Being a member of a nationality gives you rights and privileges by being born into or having worked your way into a certain way of thinking. Your nation – the one that exists by the grace of your taxes – is indebted to you as an invidual and should protect you and the way of life you represent.

For minister Donner to try to reduce the amount of protection as well as xenophobically pushing away excellent candidates for nationality is a symptom of times where we are pushed to hate each other instead of trying to grow together in humanity. OK, that might sound a bit idealistic, but shouldn’t you be trying to recruit people into your way of thinking, into the nationhood that you want to promote globally, instead of repelling them?

Expat-Nederlander wil twee paspoorten houden – Binnenland – VK.

PvdA zweert reparatie van netneutraliteit | Webwereld.

It looks like where copyright goons and the NL are failing by wanting to turn our society into a surveillance society, the unelected EU Court may come to citizens’ rescue:

Advocate General Cruz Villalón considers that the installation of that filtering and blocking system is a restriction on the right to respect for the privacy of communications and the right to protection of personal data, both of which are rights protected under the Charter of Fundamental Rights. By the same token, the deployment of such a system would restrict freedom of information, which is also protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

via European Court of Justice To Outlaw Internet Filtering; Esp. For Copyright Enforcement – Falkvinge on Infopolicy.

Without any judge or court of justice having to ‘interfere’, the NL department of justice is going to just filter out access to sites they don’t like. Because that’s never gone wrong before and no-one has ever misused that power. Not only are they going to do that, but in the process they’ll be spying on all their citizens’ net access, which is a bit like opening every single letter sent before delivery. Welcome to Soviet NL. The secretary of state for Justice, mr Fred Teeuven, refused to allow any of the free speech interest groups (such as TV or bits of freedom) entry to the press conference when he made this announcement.

Nederlands downloadverbod is websitefilter | Webwereld.

Background: In 2009, the EU discussed the issue of a term extension for the ”neighbouring rights” that record companies have to recorded music. These neighbouring rights are now 50 years from the recording of a song. The proposal was to extend them to 95 years. After a lively debate in the European Parliament, it was decided to extend them to 70 years. Then the issue got stuck in the Council of Ministers, where several countries (including Sweden and Denmark) felt that no extension was necessary. Now it appears that the Danish government has folded, which means that there is no longer a blocking minority in the Council.

Right now: On the agenda for the meeting of the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee JURI this Monday and Tuesday, there has appeared a point about making certain formal corrections to the text that the European Parliament adopted (such as the date when the new rules should enter into force). It appears that they have been trying to give the issue a low profile. The documents were not sent out to members of the JURI committee until last Friday, after we had explicitly asked for them.

Copyright term extension will be voted this week « Christian Engström, Pirate MEP.

The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers.

This includes users’ full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.

This means that the data which is handed over can be used to access your accounts.

via BBC News – Net giants challenge French data law.

Like wikileaks for the Middle East, it shows concessions made by the Palestinians weren’t good enough for Israel and the US was running around showboating, not doing much constructive.

The story behind the Palestine papers | World news | The Guardian.

Under the new law, a government-appointed media council will have the power to decide whether a publication has broken rules on what it calls balanced and ‘moral’ reporting, and can issue heavy fines. Print and Internet media can face fines of more than $100,000 and broadcasters nearly $1 million, if, for example, their coverage is deemed unbalanced. News programs cannot use more than 20 percent of their airtime on crime-related stories, and journalists may be forced to reveal their sources.Presenters at Hungarian state-run radio have already been dismissed for protesting the law on air.

via VOA | Hungary Introduces Europe’s Most Restrictive Media Law | Europe | English.

PrimariesForPalin.com aims to nominate Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate by encouraging Democrats and Independents to purposefully vote for her in state primaries. In head-to-head polls with President Barack Obama, Palin consistently fares worse than other possible Republican candidates because of her divisiveness. If Palin is nominated, Obama has a much better chance of winning reelection in November 2012.

via Mission Statement « Primaries For Palin.

For the past 20 weeks I have been engaged in a very strange dialogue with the two noble Lords, in the course of which I have been trying to bring to their attention the willing availability of a strange organisation which wishes to make a great deal of money available to assist the recovery of the economy in this country. For want of a better name, I shall call it foundation X. That is not its real name, but it will do for the moment. Foundation X was introduced to me 20 weeks ago last week by an eminent City firm, which is FSA controlled. Its chairman came to me and said, “We have this extraordinary request to assist in a major financial reconstruction. It is megabucks, but we need your help to assist us in understanding whether this business is legitimate”. I had the biggest put down of my life from my noble friend Lord Strathclyde when I told him this story. He said, “Why you? You’re not important enough to have the answer to a question like that”. He is quite right, I am not important enough, but the answer to the next question was, “You haven’t got the experience for it”. Yes I do. I have had one of the biggest experiences in the laundering of terrorist money and funny money that anyone has had in the City. I have handled billions of pounds of terrorist money.

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: Where did it go to?

Lord James of Blackheath: Not into my pocket. My biggest terrorist client was the IRA and I am pleased to say that I managed to write off more than £1 billion of its money. I have also had extensive connections with north African terrorists, but that was of a far nastier nature, and I do not want to talk about that because it is still a security issue. I hasten to add that it is no good getting the police in, because I shall immediately call the Bank of England as my defence witness, given that it put me in to deal with these problems.

The point is that when I was in the course of doing this strange activity, I had an interesting set of phone numbers and references that I could go to for help when I needed it. So people in the City have known that if they want to check out anything that looks at all odd, they can come to me and I can press a few phone numbers to obtain a reference. The City firm came to me and asked whether I could get a reference and a clearance on foundation X. For 20 weeks, I have been endeavouring to do that. I have come to the absolute conclusion that foundation X is completely genuine and sincere and that it directly wishes to make the United Kingdom one of the principal points that it will use to disseminate its extraordinarily great wealth into the world at this present moment, as part of an attempt to seek the recovery of the global economy.

And it just keeps getting better!

Lords Hansard text for 1 Nov 201001 Nov 2010 (pt 0003).

Because if you discuss the material on there, obviously you can’t handle sensitive information and so are not fit to work in government. Or in other words, you have too much of an independent opinion and won’t fit in with the superconformist monkeys and thus are not fit to work in the US Government.

State Dept. warning prospective recruits to steer clear of Wikileaks – Blog – The Arabist.

“His past posting of classified documents revealed the identity of more than 100 Afghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders?”

via Sarah Palin says: target WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange like the Taliban – ComputerworldUK.com.

Wow, she’s even more nuts than Hillary Clinton!

This is the most realistic sound I’ve heard coming from the US about the wikileaks affair. If only Clinton and the rest could be so normal, maybe we would like the US a bit more…

“Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments — some governments — deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.

“So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.

“Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.’

via Gates on Leaks, Wiki and Otherwise – NYTimes.com.

Yup – instead of just having been embarrassed and pointing out that every country makes the same kind of internal assessments, that these have to be brutally honest internally in order to be effective and then getting on with it, the US is flipping.

H Clinton, the mad spying control freak, is now claiming it’s an ‘attack’ on the ‘whole international community’. Who is she kidding? And now a senator wants WikiLeaks to be considered a terrorist organisation.

It’s not like the information released was really a big deal. Embarrasing? Yes. Devastating? No.

Get a grip, US. We’ve had enough of being dragged into vague, undefinable wars by you. Use diplomacy, not violence, for once.

WikiLeaks as Terrorists? – Chris Good – Politics – The Atlantic.

In a bizarre swipe at public media, the VVD has stated that tax payers money can’t be used to develop the websites of the public channels. Are they supposed to be website-less? The stated reason is unfair competition with newspapers, but newspapers have been notoriously slow to pick up any kind of innovation. The VVD states that the public channels can afford to experiment with new media without the risk that newspapers have, but that’s kind of precisely the point: if the public channels pick up the risk, then the commercial channels don’t have to: they can see what works and what doesn’t and for much much lower development costs copy what does work.

nrc.nl – Binnenland – VVD: geen internet door publieke omroep.

This is how the US sees EU

how the Germans see it

And there are a few more…

Mapping Stereotypes by alphadesigner.

The freedoms we rapidly lose

The Netherlands now has it’s own blacklist of websites that it forces on providers to block. The list is confidential, the methods of enforcing the block are confidential, and just like ACTA – they’re trying to put it through without releasing any details, promising transparency ‘later’.

The problem is this: if we allow any government to decide what it is what we can and can’t read, we’re on the slippery slope of censorship. Now it’s paedophelia (the example they trot out worryingly often when they limit your freedoms), next it’ll be weapon making, then it’ll be anything containing a contrary political ideology. Our freedom of expression is a very serious thing indeed to take away from someone, especially if you’re being secretive about what exactly it is that you’re taking away and how you’re doing it, but sticking a generalistic post-it explanations ‘child porn’ [that should be good enough for anybody, right?] over it is completely unacceptable.

Openheid over kinderpornofilter, achteraf | Webwereld.

It’s pretty clear: don’t enforce it and don’t discuss it behind people’s backs. The EP is doing well in terms of privacy and protection of rights!

Written declaration ACTA 12/2010 – La Quadrature du Net.

Not only that, but presenting people with facts can entrench them further in their beliefs. People willfully ignore facts that don’t correspond to their opinions.

“This bodes ill for a democracy, because most voters — the people making decisions about how the country runs — aren’t blank slates. They already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper.”

A very good article

How facts backfire – The Boston Globe.

The EU is going  to discuss whether or not to force ISPs to save the searches you make in online search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, whatever. Apart from the privacy implications, who is going to pay the ISPs for the massive extra storage capacity they’ll need, but more importantly: what defines a ‘search’ – what about if you’re looking through a job site, or a housing site or a forum? Why not force ISPs to store any and every bit of information passed through a form? Creepy stuff.

Emerce – Technologie nieuws: Bewaarplicht mogelijk uitgebreid met zoekopdrachten.

It looks like the UK is starting to be saved allreay! The ConLibs are devoted to things such as personaly privacy and are against mammoth centralised databases (such as the National ID fiasco). The government is looking to increase the safety of your data and keep much less of it. Well done, I hope this becomes a continuing trend!

ConLibs to outlaw kiddyprinting without permission • The Register.

Opinion piece by a former CIA operative on its current lack of operational capability,

On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201004/dagger-to-the-cia

Basically it’s all about the movie and music industry being able to kick you off the net and subject you to huge fines without any proof – just an accusation of filesharing is enough.  It’s also about giving the business secretary the power to make up penalties and enforcements at whim.

It’s not about stimulating creativity, new business, ensuring that everyone has broadband, etc.

Looks like labour has it’s pockets filled with copyright holders hands!

Britain’s new Internet law — as bad as everyone’s been saying, and worse. Much, much worse. – Boing Boing.

The head of Gazprom is building a most luxurious palace in the style of the XVIII century worth $ 50 million
Design documentation for anticipated future residence of the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, who looks like a huge palace in the style of the XVIII century.
Impressive, very similar to the mansion in Peterhof, suddenly brought up on the shore of the Istra reservoir palace initially caused a lot of noise in the blogs.
But officially the head of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, who recorded in the real owners of the palace, that he has the attitude toward him, not admitted.
“Our company has no relation to the” Istra Manor “- the spokesman said Gazprom” Sergei Kupriyanov. But at the same time, membership
mansion Miller refused to comment, that is neither confirmed nor denied.

English fail via Google Translate, but you get the idea.  Check out the Google Maps images at the bottom of the fishki link.

http://fishki.net/comment.php?id=60416

Translated via Google Translate

An interesting article – if you have bank customer information, which you’ve stolen from a bank, governments will pay you for that information.

If you’re a spy you’d be shot for it. It’s not right that the Dutch government is using tax payers money on criminally attained information to find people who have foreign cash assets. In a court of law, evidence obtained this way is also not allowed and for good reason.

Booming business, steal and sell to governments « Frederik Van Lierde.