THE agency that has ushered in the era of
Internet activism is a bureau called
Jansen and Janssen, named after
Thomson and Thompson, the two
detectives who feature in the Tintin
comics. Jansen and Janssen is a spin off
from the powerful squatter movement
which occurred in Amsterdam in the
'80s. Activists from the bureau who
were involved in the movement had to
interact a great deal with the police
and secret services. Their close
encounter with these law-enforcement
agencies at that time gave them the
opportunity to initiate the collection
of information on the strategies and
contra- expertise employed by
these forces.
Jansen and Janssen, founded
in 1985, soon' developed an
archive on police tactics, focussing
particularly on how the force dealt
with its more critical powers. The
organisation published its
research on how the secret service
tried to infiltrate activist movements and on how they black-
mailed asylum-seekers to work for
them. In 1994, the group revealed
how private detectives collected
information about lobby groups
and sold it to the multinationals
concerned. The bureau's other
areas of interest have been the
change in police tactics in fighting
organised crime over the years,
the influence of foreign agencies
on the seizure of drugs and the
shift towards more intelligence
gathering on the part of the
police. Earlier, although the
Dutch took the organisation
seriously they did so only to a
certain extent. Some of the
reports uncovered by the bureau
could simply not find their way to
the media.
This was the situation until two
years back, when a public prosecutor
in Amsterdam found that a special
squad team, the Inter-regional Research
Team was de facto exploiting a drug
trafficking line. The police worked
with an informant, who was allowed
to grow into someone really important
in order to infiltrate a big gang
and looked the other way when containers full of drugs arrived from
abroad. Ultimately, the police were
involved in organising the import and
export of all kinds of drugs, including
ecstasy and cocaine.
Although the first official investigation into the matter did 'not really
elucidate what was going on, the crisis
was nevertheless taken seriously.
Matters became serious enough for
both the ministers of internal affairs
and justice to submit their resignations.
Further investigation seemed necessary
and an official parliamentary inquiry
commission, the Van Traa Commission, was set up. Members of the
Commission interviewed a number of
people involved in the scandal and
the portions of the hearings which
ivere to be made public, were broad
cast live on television in October,
1995. People were shocked to hear
aliout what had been happening
and how little the higher-ups had
known about it.
The results of the Van Traa
Commission's findings were published
in 13 volumes (more than 5,000 pages)
and sold for us $397. A compact
disk read-only memory (CD-ROM)
with the same information (accessed
through an impressive search engine
and hyperlinked keywords and
notes) was available for another us $361.
Since the textual version had no
index, people were forced to buy
the entire package for over us $571.
The publishers of the report were
the SDU - the former State Publishing House which was recently privatised. The steep price tag attached to the
report caused a furor because these documents are in fact Hansards (report of
proceedings) of Parliament and should
therefore be freely available to the public. The Hansards of Parliament are free
of copyright laws as an exception is
made for the sake of democracy.
After a plea printed in the columns of the daily, NRc Handelsblad - to
put the Van Traa report on the
Internet - went unheeded, the bureau
decided it was time to act. It took
up the challenge and completed the
task within a week. The CD-Rom
was hacked and the stripped texts
were freed from the processed version.
The only thing lost were the hyperlinks and the notes. The SDU could
lay claims on the edited version but
not on the texts as such. Jansen and
Janssen spotted the loophole and
jumped right in to it! The stripped
texts were turned into hyper text
mark up language (HTML)-pages,
divided into neat paragraphs and made
accessible by a search engine. The
monopoly of the SDu had been broken
and the Van Traa report was splashed
on the Internet.
Having achieved this the bureau
received many congratulatory messages
including those from the managing
director of the SDu and the Dutch
secretary of state for home affairs.
The latter stressed the importance of
the accessibility of government information and announced a
pilot project for using teletext
on the local cable because
the masses did not own computers, The Jansen and
Janssen home page received
overwhelmingly enthusiastic
responses too. The bureau
had suddenly catapulted to
fame, been accepted by the
Dutch Parliament, and got
recognised throughout the
country.
The monopoly of the
SDu had been a thorn in
many people's flesh at various
levels. Two weeks after the launch of
the Van Traa home page, the SDu
announced that it would put all
Hansards of Parliament on line from
May 1, 1996.
But the story did not end there
because a month later, the Rijksrecherche
(an internal affairs agency, a kind of
police of the police), completed
their probe into the affairs of the
criminal investigation department
which had employed the two drug-
dealing officers. The reports brought
out by this department are usually
secret. But the results of their investigation were handed over to the
Parliament, which changed their
status. As the politicians were under
great pressure, they had to disclose
this report within a week. Two copies
of the 500-page report - full of shocking details - were made available to
each party.
Putting it on the Net was far
more difficult this time as the entire
text had to be scanned by hand and
had to be achieved within the course
of a weekend. But the bureau successfully completed this mission too. it
made available a composite package
of the Van Traa site, the internal
affairs report and a'selection of other
works by Jansen and Janssen for the
price of us $28.
The breaking of the monopoly
enjoyed by a privatised state organ is
an achievement in itself, but for the
same to happen on the Internet is
indeed a novel development. The
bureau's site on the Internet signifies a
big step forward in talks between
authorities on different levels. It has
also meant a lot to the public who
can now access information - that was
in any case meant to be public
through the electronic media. The
event has also been welcomed by
members of the Dutch Parliament
for they would be interested in getting
the couch potatoes more involved in
politics.
The actual agenda behind the entire
exercise seems to be to deepen the discussion on investigation methods. In
addition, an innovative use to which the
power of the Internet could be put, has
been disclosed. That the Internet could
add a certain value to a discussion and
supply a special dimension to a campaign, could in fact be a very important
step to developing political activism on
the Net.
