Netherlands

Claims by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) that it has successfully decrypted emails stored on Blackberry smartphones have caused bafflement at the Canadian firm.

Documents seen by Dutch blog Crime News show the NFI claiming to have decrypted 275 out of 325 emails encrypted with PGP from a handset in their possession. The NFI reportedly used software from Israeli firm Cellebrite to crack the encryption.

Running somewhat against the grain of the current political climate, the Netherlands government has issued a statement strongly supporting encryption (for everyone, not just the government) and against the idea of intelligence/law enforcement backdoors. Patrick Howell O'Neill of the Daily Dot has the details:

The Netherlands' Data Protection Authority has criticised that government's proposed data retention legislation.

The government put forward amendments to its data retention regime in response to the April 2014 European Court of Justice decision that invalidated the EU's Data Retention Directive (along the way causing trouble for countries that had based their laws on the DRD).

The Netherlands government’s websites were taken offline for around 10 hours on Wednesday following a DDoS attack.

The motive for the sustained packet-flinging assault – directed against the Dutch government website's hosting provider, Prolocation – remains unclear.

Darren Anstee, director of solutions architects at Arbor Networks, commented: “Based on the information currently available, it looks as if a variety of attack vectors may have been used in these attacks, which in itself is not that unusual.”

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Anti-piracy group BREIN has just released its annual report revealing its activities during 2013. The Hollywood-affiliated group says that in addition to taking down more than 500 torrent, linking , streaming and Usenet sites, 206 Pirate Bay proxies fell victim to its threats.

During the first few months of each year, infamous Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN details its successes of the previous 12 months.

A court in The Hague has ruled that local internet service providers (ISPs) can stop trying to block The Pirate Bay, because blocks are overbearing and do not work.

A ruling from the Dutch court (pdf) sees justice side with two ISPs that have baulked at implementing whackamole blocks and take a different view of the hard line pursued by local copyright cartel enforcer Brein.

Brein approached the courts in 2010 with a request that the ISP Ziggo put a wall around The Pirate Bay. Ziggo resisted the rightsholders' demand and was joined by another ISP called Xs4all.

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Google's practice of combining personal data from different Google services violates the Dutch data protection act, the Dutch data protection authority (DPA) said Thursday. But Google will not face any enforcement actions for now.

In March 2012, Google introduced a new privacy policy that allows Google to share personal data across all its products and services. However, Google made the changes without having adequately informed users, and without asking for their consent, the Dutch DPA said in a news release.

A coalition of defense lawyers, privacy advocates, and journalists has sued the Dutch government over its collaboration and exchange of data with the U.S. National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services.

The coalition is seeking a court order to stop Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD from using data received from foreign agencies like the NSA that was not obtained in accordance with European and Dutch law. It also wants the government to inform Dutch citizens whose data was obtained in this manner.