Digi is a new ISP who recently drilled into façades of people’s homes without notice or consent. Anyone registered with BIPT as a telecom operator does not need consent for the act of attaching their cable to the façade, but they are required to inform home owners before the work and obtain consent on the way that they run the cable.

Digi simply showed up unannounced with workers in plain clothes who drilled into façades spontaneously. Digi also neglected to say anything about it after the fact.

Proximus and Digi both neglected to give advance notice when they did this. Proximus at least left a letter in mailboxes stating what happened and offered free installation of service.

Both Proximus and Digi are also exclusive services. That is, they do not accept cash payments and thus exclude unbanked people (\~3% of the population). It’s extra evil on the part of Proximus because they have physical shops all over which obligates cash acceptance and could serve that purpose.

There is in fact no law obligating Belgian telecom operators to offer service to those whose properties involuntarily host their cables. They can be as exclusive as they want.

And worse, home owners who renovate their façade have a legal obligation to send bPost registered letters to each and every cable owner who uses their façade -- currently a hit of €10 per letter. So if there are 7 cables attached, you are effectively legally obligated to spend €70 to give advance notice before working on your own façade.

Does it have to be this way? ----------

No, because they can run their fiber under the sidewalk. They choose to uglify people’s façades to save money. As such, the law effectively strips the people of their bargaining power. In principle, the ISPs should need to entice consumers with a deal that passes some of the savings of using façades onto them. If you have a strip of terraced houses and one house does not take the deal, then it’s not a problem. The sidewalk just needs to be dug up for the house that refuses the offer.

If you look around, sometimes you will see a terraced house that has buried the cables, perhaps because they want a nice looking façade.

This could even be fixed going forward. In principle, every sidewalk will eventually be dug up again, by Vivaqua doing what Vivaqua does. Such moments would be a good opportunity for telecoms to move their cables under the sidewalk, coordinated with whoever digs up the sidewalk for other purposes. Thereafter, homeowners would not have to send 7+ registered letters every time they need to renovate their façades. But our rights and that opportunity has been squandered.

Digi is a new ISP who recently drilled into façades of people’s homes without notice or consent. Anyone registered with BIPT as a telecom operator does not need consent for the act of attaching their cable to the façade, but they are required to inform home owners before the work and obtain consent on the way that they run the cable.

Digi simply showed up unannounced with workers in plain clothes who drilled into façades spontaneously. Digi also neglected to say anything about it after the fact.

Proximus and Digi both neglected to give advance notice when they did this. Proximus at least left a letter in mailboxes stating what happened and offered free installation of service.

Both Proximus and Digi are also exclusive services. That is, they do not accept cash payments and thus exclude unbanked people (~3% of the population). It’s extra evil on the part of Proximus because they have physical shops all over which obligates cash acceptance and could serve that purpose.

There is in fact no law obligating Belgian telecom operators to offer service to those whose properties involuntarily host their cables. They can be as exclusive as they want.

And worse, home owners who renovate their façade have a legal obligation to send bPost registered letters to each and every cable owner who uses their façade -- currently a hit of €10 per letter. So if there are 7 cables attached, you are effectively legally obligated to spend €70 to give advance notice before working on your own façade.

Does it have to be this way?

No, because they can run their fiber under the sidewalk. They choose to uglify people’s façades to save money. As such, the law effectively strips the people of their bargaining power. In principle, the ISPs should need to entice consumers with a deal that passes some of the savings of using façades onto them. If you have a strip of terraced houses and one house does not take the deal, then it’s not a problem. The sidewalk just needs to be dug up for the house that refuses the offer.

If you look around, sometimes you will see a terraced house that has buried the cables, perhaps because they want a nice looking façade.

This could even be fixed going forward. In principle, every sidewalk will eventually be dug up again, by Vivaqua doing what Vivaqua does. Such moments would be a good opportunity for telecoms to move their cables under the sidewalk, coordinated with whoever digs up the sidewalk for other purposes. Thereafter, homeowners would not have to send 7+ registered letters every time they need to renovate their façades. But our rights and that opportunity has been squandered.

Given that we are now forced to patronise a bank in Belgium, I believe bank contracts must now be regarded as signed under duress. So as a consequence there may be various laws that protect those who sign something under duress, which are now triggered.

For example under the GDPR, if the legal basis for data processing is consent, there is a rule that the consent must be “freely given” or it ceases to have the effect of consent. If you sign a bank contract under duress then IIUC it should have this effect: no change to any processing mentioned in the contract that is necessary for performance of the contract, but any processing that is not essential to performance of the contract would require consent. But since the bank does not legally have consent, they cannot lawfully process the data in those situations.

Can anyone else think of any other consequences that result when a bank contract is signed by force and under duress?

I once lost access to my money because my ID card the bank had on file expired. Instead of sending me a notice or warning, the bank simply blocked the bank card. That was the bank’s way of communicating. It got me in the door dancing for them the next moment the bank was open. If that same scenario were to play out now that agreement is signed under duress, I could argue that my consent to cut off my card as a communication mechanism was not freely given -- correct? Or am I misunderstanding something?

It’s disturbing to hear the UK is /again/ changing the banknotes (according to BBC WS). Does this in any way shorten any deadline to trade-in the previous notes? Will it be possible to trade in notes that are 2 generations old?

I have a couple thousand GBP banknotes. These are the previous style and no longer legal tender. I would get burnt if I tried to exchange them for my local currency because the exchange service cannot sell them (they must send them to England). I believe I can still travel to the UK and exchange them fairly legal tender at post offices, correct?

Forced-banking has become a reality in Belgium. SPF Finances quit accepting cash payments for tax in 2019. Electrabel, Luminus, Totaal Energy, and Vivaqua all refuse cash payments for essential services (water and power).

It has become impossible to live in Belgium without being forced into the marketplace to patronise a bank. Effectively, you have no right to boycott banks in Belgium.

Consequently, banks have no incentive to earn your business. One bank has closed its doors and shut down its web portal, forcing customers to continuously buy recent Android phones and maintain a Google account to run the bank’s app (the only means of access to their account).

So the question is, what non-profit NGOs are standing up for consumers and human rights on this issue? Who can we support and collaborate with in order to fight for our right to use cash in Belgium?

According to the European Central Bank, surveys show 60% of Belgians want the option/right to use cash, while only 45% of the population actually use cash. The 15% of cashless people who want the cash option will probably grow until cash is wholly eliminated -- because not using cash empowers forced-banking.

I would like a complete list of Belgian NGOs relevant to:

• human rights
• consumer rights
• privacy
• digital rights and right to unplug

I’m aware of the following orgs. Have I missed any?

Human rights:

• Amnesty International Belgique
• League of Human Rights
• UNIA
• Vlaams Mensenrechteninstituut
• Association pour le droit des étrangers

Consumer rights:

• Test-Achats
• Euroconsumer (possibly dead)

Digital rights, privacy, transparency and the right to unplug:

• 1710.be
• Abelli asbl
• Ateliers DK
• Kids Unplugged (focused on smartphone-free childhoods)
• Neutrinet
• Technopolice (anti-video surveillance focus)
• Tac-Tic asbl
• Yellow Jackets (fights against forced-banking, but apparently a ghost org… no website or contact info)
• EDRi; NoyB (Europe-wide)

(dead ends?)

• Comité Humain du Numérique (possibly dead)
• DasPrivé (possibly dead)
• Datapanik (possibly dead)
• Gang des Vieux en Colère (possibly dead)
• Ministry of Privacy (possibly dead)
• Open Knowledge Belgium VZW/asbl (possibly dead)
• ethicalnet.eu (possibly dead)

In Brussels we are increasingly reaching a point where we can no longer talk to people face-to-face without technical hurdles and blockades. It’s clear why the Gang of Angry Elders are angry.

I simply entered a law office as a prospective customer. The door man said all visitors must register on the touchscreen tablet they had mounted on the desk, which made email and phone number a required field in order to advance to the next screen before submitting the registration. This is in Belgium, where the GDPR has a data minimisation protection in Article 5. You must surrender an email address (likely to a Microsoft user) as a precondition to sitting in the same room with someone.

Law offices, press offices, banks, and NGOs (some of which protect human rights) have put these security gatekeepers in their lobbies to prevent people talking to people. You ask to talk to someone and the response is always “do you have an appointment”? When the answer is “no”, they are helplessly incapable of making an appointment then and there. It’s a new level of human dysfunctionality.

Some Dexia branches have a very narrow time slot for people without appointments. You must get there early in hopes to get a queing position that does not get cut off at the end of the time slot.

The concept of a supplier that is subservient to the customer’s needs has been lost. It has flipped because too many boot-licking consumers are simply willing to be a doormat.

The persistence of CAPTCHAs proves this. If enough people were wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs would natrually be discontinued. But CAPTCHAs remain because too many boot-lickers are serving their corporate masters.

Starting with the open data EU directive:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/NIM/?uri=CELEX%3A32019L1024

I went to "national transposition" on the sidebar, expanded Belgium, and I see lots of Wallonia-specific statutes. The Brussels specific laws would be interesting but what I fetched was not a complete body of current law. It was a long list of modifications of past law along the lines of “change this word… replace that word..”, etc.

Does anyone have a link to the full current open data law? Preferably in french because that works best for machine translation.

I was startled to find this gem in EU directive 2019/1024 Art.9 ¶1:

> Where possible, Member States shall facilitate the cross-linguistic search for documents, in particular by enabling metadata aggregation at Union level.

Even if you neglect the “cross-linguistic” specification, merely making public documents searchable is a huge leap of progress in the EU. And I think all member states are currently breaking that law for the most part, as we are generally forced to rely on private sector ad surveillance garbage from Google and Bing to find most public sector docs.

Sure there are a few scattered search tools for some very specific collections of documents. But most public documents are not at all indexed in any publicly administered search tool.

Of course the “cross-linguistic” specification is quite interesting because document translations are sometimes performed but the result is often not shared and even more often not searchable. E.g., for some reason a university or institution in Belgium (possibly public sector) went to the effort of creating a good English version of a big piece of the Belgian Economic Code. I was lucky to stumble into it out in the wild. Per the directive (which is hopefully transposed into national law), someone who searches for that section of Belgian economic code should get a reference to the unofficial English version along with the French and Dutch versions. But they certainly do not because the national legal statutes search site is hard-coded for just French and Dutch.

This touches on a recent question I asked. If the EU were to obtain an English version of transposed directives, in principle they should be furnishing that to the public. There’s one snag here though: the open data directive seems to exclude the EU itself from Art.9.

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

I could not reach the site from Tor. The linked page is the archive.org cached version, which actually is open to all.

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

Belgian banks have gone to the Orwellian extremes of outright refusing cash deposits without proof of source, even for small amounts as low as €50! The war on cash (war on privacy) is in full swing in Belgium.

At the same time, German ATMs are not producing receipts. My understanding of EU law is that the ATM must print a receipt if there is a currency exchange on the ATM’s side of the transaction (please correct me if I’m wrong). But I see no EU law requiring ATMs to print receipts generally. Some ATMs in Germany don’t even have printers; no slot for dispensing receipts. By extension, I suppose such ATMs must not be capable of offering dynamic currency conversion (which is bizarre because that’s where the most profit is in the ATM business).

In any case, it seems a bit off that you can get cash from a German ATM, get denied a receipt (you don’t know in advance that a receipt will not be given), and then you cannot deposit that cash in Belgium due to their nannying.

Or can you? What if you write down the ATM machine’s number, location, time, date, and amount. Would a log of that information serve to document the source of the cash to legal standards?

A Turk was telling me about a peaceful demonstration he attended, in Turkey. He said police surrounded the protest. Then someone in plain clothes threw a stone at the police. One of the demonstrators noticed that the guy who threw the stone had handcuffs in his back pocket. IOW, a cop posing as a demonstrator threw a stone in order to justify the police tagging the protest as “violent” so they could shut it down.

So of course the question is, to what extent are bad actors on Tor actually boot lickers who are working to ruin Tor for everyone?

There are many situations where gov-distributed public information is legally required to be open access. Yet they block Tor.

To worsen matters, the general public largely and naively believes it’s correct to call something as “open access” when in fact there are access restrictions in place.

The resource should work like this:

1. User supplies an URL
2. Robot tries to access that page from a variety of different countries, residential and datacenter IPs, Tor, various VPNs, different user-agent strings, etc.
3. Report is generated that reports the site as “openly accessible” if no obsticles (like 403s) were detected. Otherwise tags the site as “restricted access” and lists the excluded demographics of people.

The report should be dated and downloadable as PDF so that activists can send it to the org behind site with a letter saying: “your website is not open access -- please fix”.

This need somewhat aligns with the mission of the OONI project, but they are not doing this AFAICT.

Update

I just read an announcement about Belgium’s “open data” law, which is basically a summary. It said something like “there should be no unnecessary access restrictions”. I’m not sure to what extent that accurately reflects the law, but it’s an example of what one country considers “open”, fwiw. From there, I would say most Tor blockades are not necessary but rather some lazy sysadmin looking for an easy job. They of course would then like to argue that it’s “necessary” to keep the baddies out.

Update 2

The Open Knowledge Foundation Network defines open data to be completely free from restrictions:

https://okfn.org/en/library/what-is-open/

Take the anti-spam directive, for example:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32002L0058&qid=1747912567106

The website gives us the directive but makes no references to the member state’s implementations of that. It seems a bit sloppy that visitors have to try manually searching using some private-sector surveillance advertising search tool to find a member state’s version. In Belgium it’s especially a mess because many of the official websites that “publish” laws are access restricted (e.g. Tor users often denied access). Only some segments of the public can reach some websites. We have Moniteur Belge but that involves digging a law out of a large PDF that globs together many unrelated laws and publications.

According to the EC website, the EC has a duty to verify whether the member state’s version was implemented timely and correctly. Is that done in English, or does the EU have native speakers of all languages on staff doing the verification?

I ask because if there is a translation step, then the EU would perhaps have a good quality English translation of member states laws --- which I would like access to. To date, I do machine translations which is tedious. And if the source language is Dutch, the translation tends to be quite poor.

Update: perhaps the biggest shit show is this site:

https://www.stradalex.com/

Visiting from a tor exit node with uMatrix installed, that site is in some kind of endless loop. No idea what kind of shitty JavaScript causes this, but it reloads itself non-stop and never renders. Opening the uMatrix UI shows 3rd party js rows popping up and disappearing faster than you can click to give perms. These people should not be allowed to do web service for legal information.

update 2

This page gives some general links to member state’s law pubs, but you are still left with having to dig around for the implementation that corresponds to the EU directive -- if you can get access.

update 3

Found something useful.. this page is openly accessible and has a “National Transposition” link. From there we can do an /advanced search/ and limit the collection to national transposition and search on 32002L0058, for example.

Then it finds no results, which seems a bit broken. But if I simply do a quick search on 32002L0058 then use the “national transposition” link on the left bar, that seems to work. But then in this test case I followed it all the way to a page that said “ Text is not available.”

In fact, “Text is not available” is what I got on 3 of 3 samples. So it’s a crapshoot. Hopefully the EC folks who verify national implementations are not relying on this same mechanism.

Wow, so that’s bizarre. I wonder why the French DPA would think it’s okay to force customers to reveal their gender. Luckily the CJEU overruled them and made it right in the end. But of course it’s still disturbing when a DPA is working against privacy rights.

I just heard from someone who tried to deposit €50 in cash into his Belgian bank account. The bank refused to accept the deposit unless he could prove the source of the money.

Indeed.. on a desposit as small as €50. The guy didn’t say where it came from but such small amount could have come in a card as a birthday gift.

Grannies: before putting money in grandkids birthday cards, visit your local notaire and give a sworn testimoney as to where the money came from, get it notorized, and include that with the cash.

The war on cash (thus privacy) has really made some headway in Belgium.