Netherlands Still #1 in Phone Tapping

Posted by Paul
Nov 11 2009

It was reported to the Dutch parliament yesterday that we are still number one when it comes to absolute number of phone taps! This considering that we only have a fraction of the population of other big phone tapping countries such as the USA, UK and Germany.

I reported about the first official phone tapping statistics in may 2008. Since then there has been a yearly report, but now they’ve changed that to half-yearly again.

The Numbers:
Well over 13000 phone taps in the first half of 2009.
An average of 2250 active phone taps during that time.
Of which 80% concerned mobile phones.

Compared to previous reports:
There is a huge increase of absolute number of taps compared to last years statistics. But last years where yearly, so longer running taps aren’t counted twice and thus the two can’t be compared by simply multiplying the half yearly statistics. So if we compare the to the 2007 half yearly statistics there is only a slight increase in the number of absolute taps.

However the number of average running taps has increased dramatically. In 2007 this was 1681, but the last report is of 2250 taps running on average!

Moreover there has been a slight decrease of mobile phone taps, relatively speaking.

There have been questions from the parliament whether this high number of taps actually helps solve more crime. It is however, still unclear if there’s going to be any research on this matter.

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