Dutch research security rules ‘virtually impossible to implement’

The Netherlands has taken a mostly pragmatic approach to managing the risks of international research and exchange, but the scope of its latest draft measures is ringing alarm bells.

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) has said that the plans for a Knowledge Security Screening Act, which tie scrutiny to entire fields or technologies, were “too imprecise and virtually impossible to implement”.

In a paper, the academy said the Dutch authorities should scrap the idea of screening large numbers of academics or research students, which risked creating “a false sense of security and encourages exclusion and discrimination”.

“If you have a list, in a way you’re looking at the past,” Marileen Dogterom, KNAW president and chair of its committee on the draft law, told Times Higher Education.

Aside from encouraging complacency and potentially alienating non-European Union researchers, a mega-list of touchy technologies would overlook the social sciences and humanities, areas that are “very vulnerable” to malign influence said Professor Dogterom, a biophysicist at the Delft University of Technology.

The screening proposals seem to be a departure from the Netherlands’ approach to research security, which include national guidelines and a help desk that concerned academics or staff can call for advice and which “appears to work well”, the academy said.

Others were also sceptical about the practicalities of screening non-EU researchers across entire disciplines. Hatte van der Woude, a member of parliament for the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and former staffer at the Netherlands’ main intelligence agency, the AIVD, said doing more than a quick scan of academic affiliations was “impossible”.

“If you want a real screening of a person that is very, very intensive, very difficult, [it] takes a long time, takes money and you need an information position within the country that the person’s coming from,” she said. “You absolutely cannot do large volumes of that.”

Instead of mass screening, the academy wants more of what the government has done previously: detailed, discipline-specific guidance and more awareness-raising of collaboration risks. If the Netherlands’ next government is really keen on listing dodgy fields, it should keep it short and put institutions in charge of evaluation, Professor Dogterom said.

“I don’t think in the end we think it’s wrong if you have a small list of really sensitive technologies to have something like screening, but you have to think about it in a much broader way and you have to bring the responsibility really close to where the research is done to make this effective,” she said.

The Netherlands’ well-used security help desk, which offers non-binding advice from security experts, has drawn admiration from neighbouring Belgium, with rectors in its Flemish- and French-speaking regions jointly calling for the federal government to emulate the service.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com