Last Updated on 2022-07-08 by Joop Beris
For an outgoing cabinet, our current ministers are certainly busy. Busy looking for ways to endanger our privacy, it seems. Just days after two letters from Ivo Opstelten reached the news, Dutch investigative reports for the TV program KRO Reporter have discovered documents that suggest that outgoing minister for Health, Welfare and Sports, Edith Schippers is working on a law that would allow Dutch law enforcement access to DNA information stored in Dutch medical facilities.
If it isn’t the minister of Justice who wants our encryption keys or who wants to hack computers of suspects, even across borders, it is the minister of Health, Welfare (snort) and Sports who wants to “borrow” our DNA material so the police can maybe solve crimes with it. As if the Dutch government doesn’t know enough of us already: electronic patient records, public transportation card, wiretapping of phones, records of all our online activities, GPS on smart phones, cameras everywhere, travel records, fingerprints in passports, birth records, tax records and all the things I haven’t mentioned, now it seems they want your DNA information too. It makes you wonder when the Dutch police will have enough information to solve anything.
Welcome to police state Holland, where everything you say and do is monitored, catalogued, indexed and correlated because maybe you could be a criminal. It seems that the principal of innocent until proven guilty is slowly becoming guilty until proven innocent. At least our thoughts are still private. For now…