A secure democratic Net is a fundamental right

In the dispute about some promotions at the top of the Belgian police force personal emails are being published by some newspapers. They had been circulating before but now they are published in full. 

Some remarks about the emails that were sent from a private hotmail address. 

First possibility is that the hotmailaddress of the chief of the Brussels police is compromised. We have published around 9600 emailadresses from compromised emailadresses, there are tens of thousands more for sale and maybe that address is one of them.

Secondly possibility is that if the email was sent to an official emailaddress of the police than there is a real enormous problem. The problem is that you can't trust your email again. You will never know when it is maybe coming out or being transferred or being published. And maybe somebody else is watching and reading with you at the (mail) server, your PC or your mailbox. You don't have to be paranoid to understand that this can bring about a standstill in emailcommunication and as email as replaced communication in communication. 

Thirdly there seems to be a problem with the security of email in the police department if the mails were ever sent to an official policeaddress. It is not encrypted. It is not really monitored because otherwise someone would already have been disciplined for leaking and reading those emails. 

Or maybe it is just someone who wants to take revenge for whatever reason and has forwarded those mails to someone else. What do you do in that case ? Well instead of making emails general and sending the same email to a group of people, you make each email a bit different. So when it leaks you know exactly to whom you have sent what.

Meanwhile the ITmanagers of the police have a real problem on their hands.