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Comment by northwest | Hacker News Reader

Your first sentence would imply that at least the UK, Germany and France are not civilized countries.

On a per-capita basis, the Netherlands is at the top with far more electronic surveillance than almost any other country, and the U.S. is at the bottom. (This may be only domestic LE surveillance, can't remember.)

The number of times the Dutch police have legally tapped telephone and internet lines may vastly exceed that of others such as the U.S. because the U.S. (thinks it) doesn't need a warrant and as such it's not being logged as a wiretap.

Some numbers of Dutch wiretaps: http://www.thehollandbureau.com/2010/03/07/the-netherlands-c...

Thanks for the citation. Excerpt from the article:

"That is 1681 per day. 84% of this tapping concerned mobile phones. Compare this with the news that there were 2208 taps in the United States in the whole of 2007."

It's comparing like to like. Neither numbers include intelligence-related surveillance, only domestic criminal law enforcement. The Dutch are wiretap-happy and the U.S., thanks to Title III, is relatively restrained.

The ability to intercept the communications of anyone on the internet without a warrant is relatively restrained?

Do you even have a source for your claims? How exactly are you comparing the two?

The U.S. courts publish non-intelligence wiretap stats per year: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=us+courts+annual+wiretap+statistics+201...

Intelligence gathering is rather different.

Why would you bother to wiretap, when you can listen to everyone, or get far more information through other means of data collection?

A) it's far more plausible to roll out pretty much any infrastructure in population-dense areas (i.e. netherlands, britain).

B) We really have no idea how much the US is wiretapping because apparently we don't need public warrants anymore because terrorists and freedom.

sorry: let me make it clear..

i consider US a high profile country when we get into account the "quality" and sofistication of its citizens..

its high developed concerning the consciousness and general inteligence of its people.. thats is exacly why is so scary

it makes me remember the question we keep making ourselves of why and how the sofisticated(and also high profile citizens) of the germany of the 30´s could be swallowed by the ideology of the nazis..

we end up believeing this is all about cultural matter.. for us looking outside of it looks that privacy its not that big deal, and when it is.. the governement get rid of it by making hocus pocus and creating virtual terror, so they can make people support they efforts to brake privacy and freedom

> i consider US a high profile country when we get into account the "quality" and sofistication of its citizens..

Based on...what, exactly?

im starting from the premisse that at least people have a good educational level to understand whats happening.. it gets higher in satelites regions like new york, SF, LA, chicago, seattle, etc..

but you know, generalizations are pretty much questionable, what do we really know?! :)

What I'd simply like you to see is that, while it's true that the US has a leading role in the history of humanity, the problem of mass surveillance enabled via corruption is very present in (at least!) Western Europe as well.

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