Dutch Are Champions with 26,435 Phone Taps

(DutchNews.nl) Sept. 3, 2009 – The justice ministry authorised taps on 26,425 telephones last year, justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin told MPs.

The figure does not include the number of taps operated by the intelligence services (AIVD), which is considered to be a state secret.

The Netherlands sanctions more phone taps per capita than any other country in the world. For example, US officials sanctioned just 2,208 phone taps last year and the UK 1,881. And although France and Germany agreed to more taps, their populations are also far larger.

Hirsch Ballin told MPs no conclusions could be drawn about phone tapping because of the different legal systems involved. But there are enough safeguards to make sure taps are used properly in the Netherlands, he said.

Unlike in many countries, the Netherlands allows the police to record all conversations made by crime suspects, including calls to their lawyers. Several court cases have come unstuck in recent years because officials have failed to destroy recordings of such conversations as they are supposed to by law.

Prison phone tap threatens court cases

… a case against a number of Hells Angels collapsed because secret recordings between suspects and their lawyers had not been destroyed. Judges said the public prosecution department had ‘seriously… and repeatedly broken the rules’.

(BBC News) – The Dutch have been using telephone tap evidence since the 1970s – anyone who is suspected of having committed a crime punishable with four or more years in prison can be the subject of a telephone intercept.

Once Dutch police officers have a warrant from a judge they tell the telephone service providers to divert all calls via a central intercept centre. The calls are recorded digitally and the police computer can store as many as 10 million calls.

Safeguards

Robert Van Bosbeek, the Dutch police commissioner in charge of this operation, stresses that ordinary police officers are not allowed access to the area where the recordings are made in order to preserve the integrity of the recordings.

All calls are recorded so that they can also provide material for the defence. However, there are some concerns from the Dutch data protection authorities about the recording of calls between lawyers and their clients.

“The law in the Netherlands says that intercepted phone calls between attorneys and their clients must be destroyed. But the Dutch government has been keeping under wraps for years that no one has the foggiest clue how to delete them (Google translation). Now, an email (PDF) from the National Police Services Agency (KLPD) has surfaced, revealing that the working of the technology in question is a NetApp trade secret. The Dutch police are now trying to get their Israeli supplier Verint to tell them how to delete tapped calls and comply with the law. Meanwhile, attorneys in the Netherlands remain afraid to use their phones.”

Dutch article NRC newspaper: Ministry of Justice had no knowledge how to delete wiretaps

See e-mail from an expert of the Korps Landelijke Politiediensten (KLPD) establishing the fact the technology is proprietary of the Israeli supplier of the computersystem for intercepts (Verint).

“It is explained to me by representatives of the head company that information is deleted in one of the subsystems of the interceptsystem. This subsystem is named “Netapp” and is obtained by our supplier from their supplier of this subsystem.”