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Lotte Houwing, File coordinator at Sleepwet

Lotte Houwing of the Public Interest Litigation Project

Fighting The State

Strategic Litigation Against Mass Surveillance

During Bitcoin Wednesday on 7 February, 2018, Lotte Houwing of the Public Interest Litigation Project (PILP) will talk about fighting mass surveillance with strategic litigation.  The Dutch Intelligence and Security Services Act, also known as the Sleepwet, dramatically increases the capacities of the Dutch intelligence services.  For example, it allows:

  • Bulk surveillance, the untargetted monitoring of communications on a massive scale;
  • Mass storage of the gathered information for up to three years;
  • Hacking of organizations and individuals, whether or not they are targets of an investigation;
  • Collection and permanent storage of anyone’s DNA profiles in a secret database; and
  • Exchange of this data with foreign agencies, including those of oppressive regimes.

Lotte will give a short intro to strategic litigation, why she believes it’s necessary to fight this law, what can be done about it through strategic litigation and what PILP is doing right now.

Lotte Houwing is a file coordinator for the Sleepwet at the Public Interest Litigation Project, a five-year project of the NJCM.  The NJCM is The Jurists’ Commission for Human Rights in The Netherlands, which belongs to the International Commission of Jurists (the ICJ) an organization that protect human rights through the Rule of Law.  Lotte is completing a research Master’s desgree in law at the University of Groningen and also works at the Transnational Institute, a think-tank based in Amsterdam where she conducts research on the Sleepwet and helps coordinate the campaign against it.

Lotte Houwing of the Public Interest Litigation Project