Friday December 10 2010 / Citizenship
The government as a black box
Citizens are approached as if they are suspects. Fingerprints, biometric data, medical records, they are collected and stored without limits. They disappear into a black box. Objections against false or unjust storage and use of such data are increasingly hard to make. Control mechanisms - a necessity in a democratic state - are being frustrated. Personal freedom and the privacy of the individual are at stake.
The Humanist Alliance and Civil Rights Protection Platform address these and other issues, such as the Passport Act, the child records, the issue of treatment combinations diagnosis that is required of therapists and the access to medical data.
The Humanist Alliance will also launch the Civil Rights Protection Foundation. This new foundation's objective is to stop the interference in the privacy of the citizen by an opaque government acting under the banner of "safety and prevention".
With Vincent Böhre (President Civil Rights Protection Platform), Quirine Eijkman (senior researcher/professor at the Centre for Terrorism & Counterterrorism, Fellow ICCT - The Hague, Campus The Hague, University of Leiden and Chair of the Dutch Jurists Committee for Human Rights and), Koosje Verhaar (head Communications College Protection Personal Data Information), Alex Brenninkmeijer (National Ombudsman) and Willem Trommel (professor of policy and administrative science, Free University of Amsterdam).
See the pictures on our Flickr page.
Organised by Civil Rights Protection Platform and The Humanist Alliance
There are no reactions yet