THE Dutch government’s 2012 budget will be presented to parliament by finance minister Jan Kees de Jager tomorrow – but the text is already in the public domain, thanks to a student hacker.
Bram Talman hacked into the IT company that puts the information online, found last year’s document by using its uniform resource locator (URL) – the character-string that allows information to be retrieved – replaced “2010” with “2011” and up came with the latest version.
The history student tweeted the document from his Twitter address, making himself an instant celebrity. “Every year there is a huge struggle between the different media companies to get the budget details first, so I started searching and came up with it pretty easily. Since then I’ve been inundated with interview requests and still have 200 missed calls.”
Its publication forced the prime minister, Mark Rutte, to concede that the document was genuine and all the details correct, including a breakdown of €3 billion in tax increases for industry.
Mr Rutte was clearly angry. “The leak is extremely irritating and unfortunate,” he said. The IT company, Facetbase, said the cause of the embarrassment had been human error, which it very much regretted. Normally, said its head of crisis management, Peter van der Maat, a fake version of the new document would be put online until the real one was ready – but that had not happened.