Dutch politics – Page 2

Is Google Streetview NL In Breach of EU Data Protection Law?

Published on March 20, 2009

Streetview may be winning in court in the US, but they may find the legal going a bit stickier in the EU.

The furore in the British press this morning about the advent of Google Streetview in UK and NL echoes that of its US launch, when Google Streetview, which allows the casual browser to wander at will virtually peeking in windows, gardens and doors, or wherever else Google’s camera poked its invasive lens, faced legal challenges on breach of privacy grounds.

So far Google’s defeated its legal challengers – but will EU data protection laws defeat Google?

Streetview’s just been launched here in NL too, and lo and behold! There’s our house: and our bedroom window, which you can look right into. And our front door, with our names on it.

That’s because it’s obligatory when you move into a property here to register your residence with the local authority, the gemeente. They then give you or you buy an embossed nameplate (see above), which you put on your front door, usually above the letterbox or by the doorbell. (Makes it easier to round you up – the Arena bomb hoaxers arrested up the street the other day had their names on the letterbox too).

This means that what Google Streeetview has done, in effect, is to compile a visual database of the names and addresses of every resident in the Netherlands save those paranoids – or the sensible, your choice – who haven’t complied with the local gemeente‘s pettifogging door-labelling rules.

Did Google or its licensers in government ever consider that, because it’s possible to zoom in on this database and that therefore it’s accessible to any casual viewer, they are potentially in breach of EU data protection laws – specifically Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data?

Google claims it owns all Streetview data. Streetview NL is a database, although it’s visual. Surely any database containing individuals’ names and addresses should be subject to EU data protection regs? I’d certainly contend it should*.

Any EU member government body that allows or licenses Google to compile such a database might also be in breach of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the privacy of individuals and families; broadly, it covers “private and family life, .. home and correspondence”, subject to certain restrictions that are “in accordance with law” and “necessary in a democratic society” .

I’m no expert on EU data protection laws and their application in NL – *I am no longer a lawyer – but that jumped right out at me.

Why didn’t it jump out to any of Google’s high-priced advocaten?

UPDATE

Heh.

When interviewed, a Google Streetview driver/photographer demanded he not be photographed.

If the shoe fits…

Published on February 25, 2009

Throw it at the apologist for Israeli state terrorism:

During a talk at the Apollo Hotel in Amsterdam on Sunday, Israeli speaker Ron Edelheit was pelted with shoes thrown by members of the audience. Mr Edelheit was a spokesman for the Israeli army during its recent offensive in the Gaza Strip. Police arrested two men and one woman, all in their early twenties. Outside the hotel, around fifty others protested against Mr Edelheit’s visit, in what police said was a peaceful manner.

According to the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel, the location for the event was changed at the last moment, after the College Hotel received threats.

BTW, that innocous sounding Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel is the main zionist propaganda arm in the Netherlands, so everything they say about anti-semitism or “threats” should be taken with a boulder of salt. They were last seen spewing the exact same lies about Israel’s war on Gaza as you could read on every zionist blog.

Apathic students are good for business

Published on February 25, 2009

Hicham Yezza looks at the student protests against the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza and what this meant for the political awareness of students:

For anyone interested in the health of our political system, these events are highly instructive. For a start, they would have been unthinkable a decade ago: everyone remembers the quasi-proverbial, and not wholly undeserved, reputation students have cultivated over the years for extreme political apathy. Indeed, the extent of the indifference to the political process among the youth was a source of national despair, wistfully and routinely bemoaned by politicians across the spectrum.

More importantly, these protests have also been very indicative of some larger truths: not only have they highlighted a rise in political awareness among a new generation raised in the shadow of the Iraq war debate, they have also exposed what has for long been a suspected but unspoken reality: rather than being the centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore, British universities are now little more than businesses purveying a product, employable students. The message is unambiguous: political engagement might be good for the mind but it is very, very bad for business.

Of course I doubt these “centres of learning, debate and intellectual engagement of yore” ever really existed apart from in golden Baby Boomer memories of ’68… Universities have always been as much if not more guardians of the existing order as incubators of radicalism and any room for political engagement has to be created by the students themselves. What has happened in the last few decades is that this room, hard won during the sixties, seventies and eighties, has disappeared as universities “went commercial” while succesive governements made it more difficult for students to do anything but study. If you have to depend on a student loan of several (tens of thousands) of pounds to be able to study, you’ll be less likely to waste your time with political activity, especially if, as in the Netherlands, your loan or grant is made dependent on your study results. It’s perhaps no coincidence that there was little if any student protest over here against the invasion of Gaza, certainly not on the scale of the UK protests.

If the name of Hicham Yezza sounds familiar, it’s because he was the student arrested for supposedly downloading an Al Queda terrorism manual, which turned out to be made available at the U.S. Department of Justice website and who, once he wasn’t charged under the anti-terrorism law, was re-arrested for unspecified offences against the Immigration Act — wouldn’t want to waste an investigation after all. Here’s what you can do to help him.

No more coffeeshops by 2010?

Published on November 10, 2008

That’s what one criminology professor says in an interview (Dutch). Henk van de Bunt, who last year co-wrote a report on the growing of marijuana in the Netherlands and the growing interest organised crime has in it, says continuing foreing pressure as well as this growing criminalisation of softdrugs that will lead to the end of the Dutch tolerance for it. The problem is that while buying and selling softdrugs is tolerated (not legal, just not actively prosecuted), growing it and selling it wholesale isn’t. And while growing weed once was done by amateur and homegrowers, organised crime has gotten increasingly involved with it. It’s this creeping criminalisation that will be the death of the coffeeshop, according to van de Bunt.

Now there have always been predictions about the end of tolerance as long as this policy has existed, but this time this prediction might be more accurate than usual. In the past decade the Dutch police has become much more aggressive in combatting the growing marijuana, which has driven out the amateurs and hobbyists as they can’t take the risks anymore. Meanwhile political pressure, both on council and national level to limit tolerance has increased as well. A few weeks ago for example two councils near border with Belgium decided to close down all coffeeshops in their cities because of troubles caused by drugs tourism, while the current government has pledged to forbid coffeeshops from opening near schools.

This is all part of an unspoken campaign to end tolerance of softdrugs not be explicitely ending it, but by making it so unworkable that it has to be ended. By going after the homegrowers the police has encouraged the spread of organised crime into the cannabis trade, which makes the case for ending tolerance that much easier. You can’t argue that ending tolerance will drive the trade udnerground if much of it already is in the hands of the mob anyway. The other prong of this campaign is to put more and more “reasonable” restrictions and demands on coffeeshops, to make it harder to open one or keep one open, death by a thousand cuts. To completely end tolerance has not yet been politically viable, but the van de Bunt is right to think it’s not that far off anymore, thanks to this silent campaign.

A better solution would be to legalise softdrugs completely, both retail and wholesale and make the growth of them a state monopoly. Chances of that happening are not so good though…

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)

You Say ASBO, I Say Eugenics

Published on November 7, 2008

The Dutch Labour party have placed a bill before parliament that would force women judged ‘unfit mothers’ to take court-ordered contraception:

Women in the Netherlands deemed “unfit mothers” may soon be forced to take contraception, if a draft bill currently before the Dutch parliament is passed. The bill “targets women who have been the subject of judicial intervention due to their bad parenting,” says its author, a member of the Netherlands’ socialist Labour Party.

Under the proposed legislation, a woman judged unfit who refuses to take contraception and becomes pregnant would have her child taken away at birth. The infant then would be placed in a foster home.

[…]

Disabled mothers already face a worldwide uphill battle for the right to bear children. Earlier this year, “K.E.J.,” a woman with developmental disabilities, was taken to court by her own aunt, who wanted K.E.J. to be sterilized against her will. K.E.J. won her court battle. But would a woman with similar disabilities be judged unfit under the proposed Dutch system? What about a woman who could not care for a child due to a mental illness like post-partum depression, but who has entered a treatment program and wants to try again?

The bill does not appear to include any prohibitions against discrimination based on disability, except that parents who have not yet raised a child and been judged unfit based on the way in which they parented that child would not be affected. Therefore, women would not be put on court-ordered contraception before having their first child.

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