Yes, that worked out great

Yes, that worked out great

07-04-2015 09:50:33

By: Wido Potters

It has been an eventful week for us last week. On Wednesday morning the verdict of our procedure on the retention law was due. Our lawyers, Fulco Blokhuis and Otto Volgenant of Boekx Lawyers let us know that verdict would be sent to them by fax (...) at 10 am. The adrenaline levels were high even before the verdict, because Radio 1's reporter Maino Remmers made two live reports between 8 and 9 already. Much to Teun's dismay, who recorded this event for posterity and was told to quickly stop doing that and was then interviewed in the middle of the broadcast as well.

Recordings of the two reports of Radio 1 can be found below.

From 10 am, we were sweating like pigs. Around 10.30 the verdict finally came. And 'it was unanimous, a ridiculously huge success'. To everyone's surprise, the court ended the retention obligation for all providers, not just the plaintiffs like Voys Telecom, SpeakUp and BIT. And thus began BIT's, by Andy Warhol predicted '15 minutes of fame'. Suddenly our comments were interesting to seemingly all media. It is a really good feeling when the 8 o'clock NOS news opens with your story without you having to keep them hostage.

And indeed, last week not only BIT, but KPN, Vodafone, UPC, Ziggo and many others have stopped with the long term storage of traffic data of all Dutch citizens. After stopping the creation of the logs, the next step is to remove the old ones. Some providers are awaiting an appeal from the ministry, but there is no need. Old logs can, according to us, be removed without any future legal consequences. And so it came to pass, the joyous event was obviously recorded.