Geheime diensten en de democratische rechtsstaat

On the eve of the advisory referendum on the new Intelligence and Security Services Act (Wiv) on 21 March 2018, Judicial explorations publishes a special issue on 'Secret services and the democratic rule of law'. An important issue in the public discussion about the 'drag law' or 'interception law' is the power to 'unfocused tapping', i.e. the interception of communication traffic that runs via fiber optic cables, and the consequences of the use of that means for the citizen. There is ample attention for this discussion in this episode, but the many other aspects of the Wiv 2017 are also discussed, such as the supervision, the precise tasks and obligations that the services receive and the international cooperation. The position of secret services and their relation to politics and society is historically highlighted and linked to the question of what can be expected of intelligence and security services in this time. Various contributions hightlight te fact that Dutch AIVD and MIVD and their predecessors have long been imprisoned in image formation. Traditionally secret activities do not relate well to publicity and participation in public debate. But the lack of information about the method and powers of the Dutch secret services contributed to the popularity of a metaphor as a 'dragnet' and fed the mistrust of citizens towards the government

Penultimate unit effect in free-radical copolymerization

Based upon new insights into the dynamics of propagation reactions, a theoretical justification of the penultimate model in free-radical copolymerization kinetics is proposed. It is suggested that the penultimate unit effect may contain a large steric contribution (a different penultimate unit may affect the frequency factor for propagation by a factor typically between 1 and 10) and that the effect on activation energies is generally small. This implies that the stabilization energy model, where only differences in activation energies play a significant role, is valid only under unusual circumstances. Furthermore, a possible explanation is given for the occurrence of both the implicit and explicit penultimate unit effects. It is shown that mainly systems in which there is a large difference in the sizes of the substituents of both monomers are expected to exhibit an explicit penultimate unit effect. Finally, it is shown that neither a purely enthalpic effect, nor the steric effect proposed here, provides an adequate explanation why, experimentally, mainly radical reactivity ratios less than unity are found