Dutch trust

After the famous ‘to go Dutch’, ‘Ducth courage’ and a ‘Dutch wife’ we might need a new one: Dutch Trust. I guess the definition would be something like: to trust someone who can not be trusted.

What happened? The Dutch government in the past couple of weeks introduced the following new rule:

• All telephone and internet connection information is kept for 12 months, twice as long as European regulation dictates. The CDA, one of the ruling parties, even opted for 18 months, but this idea was refused because the costs would be to high(!). Link (in Dutch).

Apart from the new law the following two bits of information also came out in the last two weeks:

• The Dutch government is talking to the US government to have ISPs snoop on their own customers. The idea here is that ISPs will be made responsible for the pirate copies their customers download from the internet. Link (in Dutch).
• The minister of Justice announced today that in Holland every day 1700 phone calls are tapped. You might ask whether this is a big number or not. Compared to the US, where 2800 phones are tapped every year, one could argue it is. Link (in Dutch).

Now if you think the Dutch would go out on the street and demonstrate, you are right. There was a big demonstration today in Holland where the truck drivers honked 3 times to express their disapproval of the upcoming 3 cent tax increase on gasoline. The government was not impressed. Link (in Dutch).