[Freak_NL]

The money going to OpenSSL might be related to the issue the Dutch government ran into in 2011 with the Diginotar (a certificate authority) hack; the TLS certificates for Dutch government websites were compromised at that time. While this hack was not related to weaknesses in OpenSSL (as far as I know), this did put the spotlight on the vulnerability and dependence on of the certificate chain. Supporting the software that provides this crucial layer of security makes a lot of sense for a government that has been bitten once.

[Confiks]

The amendment to provide €500 million to open sources encryption project (initially only OpenSSL), was done by D66's Kees Verhoeven. He has a history of asking question about the Snowden revelations and other issues around computer security. He is also partly responsible for the amendment on net neutrality, and the infamous 'cookie law' (which is actually more of a 'do not 3rd party track before asking consent' law).

For example in June has asked questions [1] about "the news that American intelligence agencies used vulnerabilities in encryption software" (specifically weak DH / Logjam).

If anything, this proposal has more to do with Logjam than with Diginotar. Not all too incidently, improving OpenSSL would do nothing to prevent another Diginotar from happening.

[1] http://www.tweedekamer.nl/downloads/document?id=97a9bc20-eca...

[skion]

You probably mean €500 thousand, not million.