Arjen Kamphuis

Arjen Kamphuis (Premature Death?, Extraordinary Rendition?)
Born	1971
Nationality	Dutch
Dutch IT-expert with a Wikipedia connection. He disappeared during a trip in Norway in 2018.

Arjen Kamphuis was a Dutch cyber-expert who disappeared in Norway in 2018. He was a friend of Julian Assange and visited him in the Ecuadorian embassy during his asylum.

Ancilla van de Leest, former party leader of the Dutch Pirate Party and one of his best friends stated “He is one of the world's most prominent cybersecurity experts worldwide. He takes an ethical approach and thinks about how we ensure that our society remains a free democratic constitutional state at a time when we often communicate online.

Disappearance in Norway

The area Kamphuis disappeared in, the Salten-district in Norway, has many important military installations

On 20. August 2018, Kamphuis checked out of his hotel in Bodø in Northern Norway, and took the train to Rognan, a village 83 KMs away. The last witness observation was of him walking from the train station to down-town Rognan.

A few days after Kamphuis was reported missing on August 29., a damaged kayak and a paddle were found at the water's edge by The Skjerstad Fjord. A number of other personal belongings were also found floating in the sea.

Telephone records show that two telephones connected to Kamphuis were used for a short period on 30 August, ten days after he went missing. One phone is linked to him as a private person, while the other is his work phone. Both phones had signals that lasted less than an hour, and were recorded in Stavanger, a thousand kilometres away. No further information of who was called has been made public.

The Norwegian police have come to the conclusion that he most likely died in a kayaking accident in Skjerstad Fjord near Rognan on the evening of 20 August 2018. This missing person has so far not been found and there is reason to believe that he has disappeared in the ocean.

In a 2017 interview, Kamphuis commented on Julian Assange, a comment with an echo of his own disappearance a year later:

 Hillary Clinton has wondered aloud, "Can't we drone this guy?" Her advisor Bob Beckel shouted on TV, "We should illegally shoot the son of a bitch." When people at that level make those kinds of statements, it is no longer a joke.

House Burglary

"I had moved to Germany, just had a new apartment. We had been away for a day and a half, and when we got home, when the outer door was opened, the cylinder came out of the lock. Then you know that someone has been in your house, and if nothing of value has disappeared there, then you know: it was probably a warning. And so more things have happened.

I do not know whether I will be followed digitally. You will not be aware of the professional surveillance of an intelligence service, unless the service wants you to know. And very often they want to, to intimidate you."

Israeli surveillance of the Netherlands

He commented on surveillance in the Netherlands:

 The new law is probably intended to make retroactive technical practices legal. That's how it often goes. For example, long before the Intelligence and Security Services Act (Wiv) came into effect, the Dutch government purchased electronic tools, including from Israeli companies. You don't buy those tools if you're not going to use them, right?

 At the time, when I spoke to people who worked in those circles, they complained that Israeli software was so opaque, and people often came from Tel Aviv to do software upgrades, and they were not allowed to watch what those guys did. This is software that stays in systems that are linked to the telephone exchanges. So we are talking here about one or more Israeli companies that have low level access to the entire communication structure of the Netherlands, and therefore without our government being able to know what that system actually does. So if you can check that remotely, you can also move that remote data from the Netherlands to Tel Aviv. Which means, for example, that you can eavesdrop on every ministerial meeting.

Opinions

 Unless you take radical measures, lives in the Western world are 100% transparent to a very long list of secret services, and that is not limited to state actors, but can also be large companies, which may or may not cooperate with governments, and in that role also have access to things themselves.

 All countries have (a deep state) in a sense. You see it more clearly...in the United Kingdom. There  MI5 and MI6 are a state within a state. There is no supervision whatsoever. Every politician in the country knows, "Don't fuck with MI5". Because every joint you've lit since you were sixteen and every sexual escapade is on your file and can end up with The Sun. They've been around for nearly a century, and have never had a budget cut. Whether it was war or peace. Fuckups, or no fuckups. The only common thread has always been: more power, more people, more resources.

Wikipedia

The number of pictures on Wikimedia show that the case had high interest from users. The case used to have Wikipedia pages in several languages, but they have been removed.

Rating

3 March 2022 Terje 

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