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Comment by joelhaasnoot | Hacker News Reader

Little bit ironic BTW, seeing as The Netherlands has one of the highest phone wiretapping rates in the world.

True, however the phone wiretapping rates are subject of debate as well.

Phone wiretapping is simply one way a country can decide on by which criminal activities should be traced. Other countries do so in different ways, and comparing them, especially in different jurisdictions is not straightforward.

For civilians that do not exercise criminal activities, wiretapping will be less of an influence on their lives as ACTA or non-net-neutrality would be. On average.

The difficulty here is that NL has a strong oversight on wiretapping - so whereas in the UK, a single wiretap warrant can get other phone numbers on as riders (usually one cop doing a favour for another cop), which makes the UK numbers look smaller, the NL is more open and so has larger looking wiretaps.

That "strong oversight" has been hampered by a refusal to publish details (we have absolutely no clue why there are so many wiretaps, and it's been hard enough to get the authorities to publish the raw numbers), and the oversight fails when it comes to storing and providing access to the collected data.

The latter is particularly worrying, because we already know that in other areas, police access to private data collection is seriously being abused, and very badly organized.

The oversight basically starts and ends with granting the permission to wiretap. Everything else is murky as hell.

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