The Defence Ministry’s eavesdropping dishes at Burum in Friesland (nothern Netherlands) [Source of photo here]

Interesting recent developments in the world of security, parliamentary regulation and politics in the Netherlands. On 6 April the lower chamber of parliament passed a motion demanding that the current Minister for Home Affairs, Ernst Hirsch Ballin, make public the statistics concerning telephone tapping by the security services. At this moment only the figures from the investigative departments of the police are released.

But those figures alone have themselves raised questions in parliament: 2200 numbers a day being tapped, of which 80% mobile numbers, and this is on the rise. The civilian and military intelligence and security services (AIVD and MIVD) do not fall within this category because they don’t need to receive sanction from a judge. Previous arguments have been raised that releasing these figures will damage the operating methods of the services and so undermine security. But this is no longer satisfying several members of parliament, notably from the Socialist party.

But three days later minister Hirsch Ballin responded with a whole different suggestion. In a letter to parliament he proposed bringing an end to the rule that the AIVD must inform citizens afterwards that their telephone traffic has been tapped. The argument was that this regulation cost the service a lot of time, effort, and of course money, since many of those who have come under the surveillance spotlight are not exactly easy to trace to a residential address (even for the AIVD). The minister’s position is supported by the principal supervisory body, the Review Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD), because citizens have sufficient other opportunities to discover if they are being tracked, for instance with a straight-up request to the AIVD itself.

According to those who want to end this regulation, the AIVD’s effort to notify those it listens in on is not backed up by either the European Convention on Human Rights or the European Court of Human Rights. In other words, the service is already going beyond the call of duty in doing so. And in the current period of looming public spending cuts, it is duly being  targeted.

This has goaded several Socialist MPs into action. Not renowned as the AIVD’s most avid supporters, SP’ers such as Ronald van Raak have hit back by complaining that the AIVD has first failed in its efforts to notify citizens of its activities and will now be rewarded for its failure with the regulation’s removal. In retaliation van Raak calls on all Dutch citizens to enquire whether they have been tapped or not: “I call on all Dutch citizens to phone the AIVD.” Unmoved, the ministry retorted that van Raak was turning the issue into “a caricature”.

But what is the value of all this tapping, and the mountains of information that it produces? Does it enhance security? On a slightly different but related tack, the Davids report and the fall-out from Iraq continue to pop up. Most notably on 11 April, when the former head of the MIVD, Joop van Reijn, went public on the radio programme Argos concerning his view of how things went in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Thanks to the Davids report, van Reijn could now speak openly about those matters, but it is definitely the case that he would not do so unless provoked. And provoked he has certainly been. 

The trigger for van Reijn’s interview on Argos was former Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s declaration in the Volkskrant some weeks ago that he could not recall receiving opinion from the MIVD that was critical of the information coming in from the UK on Iraqi WMD. Van Reijn countered that this was untrue - criticism of the ’45 minute’ claim was offered, and on 15 October 2002 there was an inter-ministerial meeting where this critique was once again brought forward. The advice was ignored. Van Reijn could accept this, because politics is politics – but then don’t blame the intelligence services afterwards if things don’t turn out as you want them to. That is a cheap shot, and it brought van Reijn into the studio to defend his service. Van Reijn’s conclusion went further – if you allow yourself to be led by ‘intelligence’ from another nation, as Balkenende and de Hoop Scheffer were effectively doing, that is “a fairly serious business.” Amen.