March 20, 2018

Dutchman fined for selling voting pass

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 8:20 pm

vote-counting-rnw

On 21 March, the country is holding municipal elections, and residents who are eligible to vote will have received their personalised voting pass by mail.

Some 44-year-old guy from Waalwijk wanting to make a few euro tried to sell his voting passes on Dutch bidding site Marktplaats. And it’s a two for one because in these elections, we’re also voting in a referendum on the Intelligence and Security Services Act 2017 (aka ‘Sleepwet’ in Dutch).

The Public Prosecution Service got wind of the sale and the man was fined 250 euro. The man was pretty relaxed about it, saying “I never vote, so I thought I could make someone happy with my passes”, which is odd since the person who would use them would have to prove their identity and that seems a bit much.

The Mayor of Waalwijk said he wanted the Public Prosecution Service to investigate why this happened (why did Marktplaats go along with this, I wonder) and our guy answered unfazed that he wasn’t afraid of the mayor’s threats.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl, Photo by Photo RNW.org, some rights reserved)

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June 11, 2014

Government still misleads masses with digital ID system

Filed under: IT,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:39 am

For years, local governments have been mistakingly pointing tens of thousands of citizens if not more to an advertising agency called Digi-D in Waalwijk, Noord-Brabant instead of to the Dutch national government’s digital identification system called DigID (no hyphen, and ID in capitals), indispensable for filing taxes and other matters nowadays. In October 2012 10,000 people sent their details to Digi-D. It’s June 2014 and the wesbite the agency set up to tell people about this serious cock-up counted 40,805 mislead people on 6 June.

Digi-D the agency has been around since 2002, while DigID started up in 2005. The government’s game plan has been to strong arm the agency into changing its name, but the agency claims that it would cost them 110,000 euro to change their name, never mind lawyering up for something they didn’t mess up. To make it worse, the agency is being forced to store all this data to prove that it is a nuisance to them, but if ever the data leaked, the government would blame the agency for it!

(Link: www.omroepbrabant.nl)

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June 23, 2009

Man dies during Dutch ‘RIAA’ raid

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:11 am

Anti-‘piracy’ bureau BREIN, the Dutch equivalent of the infamous RIAA, scored its first kill last Saturday. Literally, I am afraid. During a raid on a market in Beverwijk, a 47-year-old man from Waalwijk accosted by the raiders died of a heart attack, reports Blik op Nieuws (Dutch). The police were presumably testing that the requisite taxes on empty CDs and DVDs had been paid, and were accompanied by a posse consisting of people from the FIOD (tax police) and the Thuiskopie and BREIN foundations.

Interestingly, the story of the police and of witnesses differ substantially, writes Noordhollands Dagblad (Dutch). According to the former, the man had a heart attack after running away from the merry band of official and self-appointed copyright hunters, after which the police tried to administer first aid. Witnesses however claim that the man did not run away, and that everybody just stood there, without helping the victim.

You have to wonder why private organizations like BREIN are even allowed to accompany the police on raids like this.

(Photo by Flickr user Sheep Purple, some rights reserved.)

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