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Communications Government Privacy

Dutch Government: Number of Internet Taps Has Quintupled In One Year 49

Posted by Soulskill from the go-big-or-go-home dept.
vikingpower writes "A Dutch newspaper has a digital version of the letter Mr. Opstelten, Secretary of Justice and Security, sent to Dutch Parliament (PDF in Dutch), in which he quietly admits to 56,825 phone taps (a 3% rise in one year) and to 16,676 internet taps in 2012, a 400% rise, or a fivefold increase, in one year. An older report already exposed the Netherlands as one of the biggest wiretappers in the western world. Slate also knew, back in 2006, that Europeans actually love wiretapping and internet tapping. In the Netherlands, a country with a population of only 16 million, the practice has risen to the level of a staggering 1 in 1,000 phones being tapped."
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Dutch Government: Number of Internet Taps Has Quintupled In One Year More

Dutch Government: Number of Internet Taps Has Quintupled In One Year

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  • Oh dear. In Europe, we are so advanced that we do not need people like Snowden to be heroes (the process of deciding to work for NSA directly or through contracting, thinking that you never go against people's privacy and one day you discover that is not the case and you go and leak info, wow!) and leak the info. Ministers do it instead! :-)

    • I'll take truth-telling officials over what we've got here in the the States. As best as I can tell, they've got 100% of the lines tapped and just aren't listening to them here.

      • I'll take truth-telling officials over what we've got here in the the States. As best as I can tell, they've got 100% of the lines tapped and just aren't listening to them here.

        Nahhh! If they had the tech to get 100% of the lines tapped AND listen to it, the US cash flow would be different. It's good to develop good DPI, lots of nice HPC tech is generated with the idea as the basis.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        FYI, I think the original comment refers to statements made by two old Prime Ministers that commented in a National Geographic Documentary about the Dutch Airforce and the possession of nuclear weapons in the Airbase Vokkel.

        Which, really is a public secret, since most people know about it anyway since the 80's and our F-16's have a (non-standard)nuclear strike panel in the cockpit. It is reasoned this is influencing the decision to buy the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Which is now possibly causing a revolt in

  • 1 in 1000? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jklovanc ( 1603149 ) on Friday July 19, 2013 @04:52PM (#44332833)

    I wonder if they took the 22,000 wire tap orders and an estimated 22 million phones and came up with that figure. That may not be accurate. Wire tap orders expire. There could be 12 wire tap orders to keep a 12 month watch on one phone. Multiple agencies may want information from the same phone; therefore multiple wire tap orders.

    • Why don't you write him and ask for an answer. You will probably get it. After that, you will never be alone in your phone/internet conversations :-) .

    • "... if they took the 22,000 wire tap orders and an estimated 22 million phones and came up with that figure. That may not be accurate."

      The letter states that there were 25k wire-tap orders over 2012 and that this is explicitly not the number of suspects, since some suspects use "very many" phone numbers. The letter doesn't mention 1 in 1000; that's the media spin on it.

      Why does slashdot post an artocle about Netherlands at midnight local time?

  • Ignoring the human dignity issues, my question is what did they get in exchange for going NSA on their own asses?

    Did it reduce the rate of crimes related to the wiretap investigations? I don't mean just raw numbers, I mean trendwise before and after the massive increase wiretapping what (if anything) changed?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      Ignoring the human dignity issues, my question is what did they get in exchange for going NSA on their own asses?

      Did it reduce the rate of crimes related to the wiretap investigations? I don't mean just raw numbers, I mean trendwise before and after the massive increase wiretapping what (if anything) changed?

      The Netherlands doesn't start wars and doesn't join them if at all possible. The Netherlands isn't really racist enough against any group to make it a target of any great terrorist act. The only possible reason for this level of domestic spying in the Netherlands is to keep lazy overpaid government bureaucrats in jobs.

  • Joe Average User, who doesn't know anything about the internet, assumes that we, the guys who built the Internet, made sure that all his communications would be secure from eavesdropping by... whoever. He also assumes that his posts are anonymous and won't come back to bite him in the ass when he's looking for a job. Neither one of these assumptions is at all true. The problem is that back when we were building it we really didn't think that many people would be using it and everyone who was using it at the

  • Their machines have to connect to listen. Why aren't we spying on them?

  • really question all this stuff. Not the numbers, but the purpose. Are the guys initiating and using this do it instead of doodling on paper?

    Seems that just because the technology is available it is used and expanded without questioning the purpose and effect.

    On top of it most happens under a veil of secrecy and when disclosed/caught it's defended and even more covered up or the whistle blowers are criminalized.

    I can maybe understand that some software package like Prism is developed and the wow effect

  • remember the name -- one of the biggest nitwits in Dutch politics.

    All pomp and no substance. BUT.... as a politician wont to cause
    a lot of harm to individuals and society. He's Dutch liberal party,
    which --read on-- is the Dutch conservative party. Conserve as
    in record, keep track, survey, store, use when opportune.

    A regualr fucker. Opstelten 's his name.

  • The statistics are only referring to the normal police, not the intelligence services. In the USA, the intelligence services tap 100% of the people. In the USA, the police don't even need a warrant to do a "wiretap" so there is no oversight. In the USA, county police departments routinely monitor the positions of people on probation via warrantless cellphone tracking.

    Amsterdam is to global intelligence agencies what Las Vegas is to gamblers - they all go there at least once and many of them maintain a const

  • And the European propaganda machine is also doing very well, telling citizens "don't worry about our wiretapping, at least we aren't America!"

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