In this contribution, the Dutch government’s acceptance of ethical hacking, by implementing a policy of responsible disclosure, is considered to be a beneficent development. Ethical hacking contributes to cybersecurity and is intrinsically desirable. The term positive incitement is proposed to describe the relatively new phenomenon of encouraging ethical hacking. Positive incitement will be analysed by making a comparison to the Dutch toleration policy regarding soft drugs, and to incitement by law enforcement. Positive incitement should not change into negative incitement, which would result in a serious breach of the rights of ethical hackers. Furthermore, it is argued that the intrinsic value of ethical hacking can justify searching for vulnerabilities in systems of organisations who do not approve of this in advance.

According to the advocates of the New Politics thesis youngsters are generally less interested in general elections, but are rather attracted by citizen-initiated referendums that are inspired by ecological, elite-challenging and pro-social motives. However, other scholars contend that the age-related differences that characterize participation in general elections are more or less universal because what really matters is how much is at stake. Yet, maybe a middle ground can be found between both perspectives if one explicitly takes into account the conditional nature of the New Politics theoretical framework. Based on exit-poll data regarding participation and vote choice in a Belgian citizen-initiated referendum in three different local contexts we test these conditional hypotheses. Our findings reveal that consistent with the New Politics thesis youngsters participate more and prefer pro-ecology, elite-challenging, and pro-social issue-frames, but only in ‘low stakes-contexts’ where no NIMBY-interests are at play.