[Thanks to Tangent Reality]

Knowing where political parties obtain their money is a fairly essential aspect of democracy. Transparency for financial transactions prevents parties from becoming trojan horses for hidden interests able to pay for political influence.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week the parliament discussed a proposal for a new law that would require parties to declare any donation of above 1000 Euro in their annual report, and any donation above 4500 Euro must be listed with the name of the donator. Failure to do so would mean a fine of 25,000 Euro. The consequences for Wilders’ PVV would be considerable if this went through, because the party has from day one wanted to avoid any insight into its financial affairs.

To receive state funding like the other political parties, the Freedom party would need party members, and it only has two: Wilders himself, and the Friends of the PVV foundation. In this way Wilders sticks by his aim to avoid any connection with the Dutch state. He also avoids any annual financial reports. And he maintains complete control over everything. But to do so, he needs to haul his money from somewhere else. And as everyone knows, much of it comes from abroad – right-wingers in the US, and probably Israel. There have been plenty of reports on this, some of which were compiled here on the Bureau in June 2010.

“The proposal for a law on the financial support for political parties has a long history, too long in the opinion of my party.” So spoke Tofik Dibi of GreenLeft in the debate yesterday, and his view coincided with the PvdA, who also want to ban all donations that come from abroad (nice twist too - the Communist party was villified for getting money from Moscow, so whats the difference with a party getting money from the crazy US Right?). But the show was stolen by the Freedom Party’s Hero Brinkman, who held forth against this ‘anti-PVV law’ and against a wave of critique from all the other parties for around an hour. Brinkman, who is known as the ‘democrat’ within the PVV for various efforts to develop a more open party structure, used a string of interesting arguments in response:

1) The proposed law originated as a move by former Interior Minister Guusje ter Horst to demand transparency from Pim Fortuyn’s LPF back in 2002. Once the LPF declined in numbers and was less of a threat, the law was shelved. Now that the PVV has become one of the top three parties, the law has been revived. In other words – whenever a threatening political movement rises in power to challenge the established order, this law gets pulled out.

2) The law would require all PVV donators to be made public, and this could bring them in danger – Not for nothing does Wilders wander around with heavy protection every day. The law would therefore actually be undemocratic because it would scare away Dutch individuals who would otherwise support the PVV.

3) According to Brinkman, only nine democracies provide state money for political parties, so the Netherlands already belongs to a minority of states. (needless to say, he didn’t name the other eight, and one wonders if he knows what he is talking about here).

4) The fact that the Freedom party might obtain its money from the US is nobody else’s business.

5) Final point – the new law is so full of holes that it will be possible to find the gaps in it anyway. For instance, money coming in to local branches of a political party will not have to be declared, offering a large and obvious loophole.

Obviously, for any normal politician it would have take around ten minutes to outline these points. For Brinkman, however, this was a useful stage for a tirade against all things leftist and CDA-ish, stringing out his defence of the wonderful contribution that the PVV makes to Dutch democracy so much that the questioners had to repeat their enquiries more than once in order to get an answer out of him. Dibi’s protests that the law reflects the anti-corruption stance of Dutch foreign policy – which the PVV supports – went nowhere against Brinkman’s determination to avoid real debate on the issue. For anyone who wants a taste, the debate can be found here.

Looks like a solid majority in parliament want to pass the law. Is it anti-PVV? It is an important move to standardise Dutch politics by getting everyone to play by the same rules - and there is only one loser, as the Dutch press have made clear. Private financial arrangements are the life and soul of the whole Wilders operation. He has to be able to declare a distance between himself and ‘the state’ (i.e. established politics), otherwise his whole carefully constructed image collapses.

Brinkman’s Pyrotechnics included the announcement that the PVV would find ways around the law if necessary, a sign of the way ahead. But the law could just add extra weight to the apparent decline in Wilders’ fortunes shown by recent opinion polls. When it comes to the effects of economic crisis, will the voter after all choose the Socialists over the PVV? Maybe….

The revelation in a tv documentary on Monday night that Maxime Verhagen wanted to mobilise the AIVD to find out about Geert Wilders’ plans with Fitna has kicked up a major storm in parliament this week. The opposition has been busy peppering the cabinet with demands for an explanation. Yet somehow the words ‘storm’ and ‘teacup’ come to mind. And Wilders himself has remained pretty much out of sight.

On Tuesday the parliament demanded a response from Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner, but he adopted the classic ‘neither confirm nor deny’ approach, and gave the usual rejoinder that all matters discussed by the ministerial council and concerning the AIVD are secret and shall remain so. But any opportunity to undermine the cabinet is worth seizing, so we had the spectacle of Tofik Dibi (Groenlinks), Alex Pechtold (D66), and Jeroen Recourt (PvdA) falling over themselves to table questions and haul Donner back to parliament for further interrogation on Thursday.

Dibi wants the CITVD to investigate, because after all MPS should be allowed to express their views freely and if necessary should receive the protection of the security services to do so. Pechtold thought this was a cheap shot, instead demanding that Donner and Verhagen walk the plank while facing a barrage of criticism from the irate opposition. Recourt protested that this was evidence of an undermining of the democractic system – ‘Nixon-like practices’, for which Nixon (read: Verhagen) had to resign. All three of them then joined forces to submit a list of 11 questions for Donner and Verhagen, including the following: Can you provide an overview of the members of parliament who have been eavesdropped or surveilled by the intelligence services? If not, why not?

What is going on? Firstly this is not only an opportunity for more cabinet-bashing, but more specifically Maxime-bashing, the real entertainment for a large section of the parliament (including a large chunk of his own Christian Democrats). So far Donner has taken the flak, and on Thursday he responded true to form (plenty of outraged indignation etc). Secondly this seems to be yet another chance for taking the AIVD down a peg or two, it being a popular target for those afraid that the ‘secret state’ is forever undermining the democratic system. Others disagree – aivdwatch has pointed out that we need the AIVD to watch out for serious breaches of democratic protocol, as the case of Wilders’ PVV colleague Gidi Markuszower illustrated not so long ago. And Roelof Bouwman has reminded us that not so long ago members of the Communist party, the Pacifist Socialists, even the Farmers party were regular targets for security service surveillance as ‘threats to the state’.   

Wilders, of course, has been here before – back in 2007 the Telegraaf printed a story, leaked from the AIVD, about Wilders’ visits to the Israeli Embassy which triggered a list of questions from GW  himself for the then Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst. The Minister denied the allegations but refused to go any further than that. Vrij Nederland (among others) jumped in to question the right of the AIVD to leak judgements on a politician’s loyalty to the press.

So four years ago the Left backed Wilders against the security service, saying he should be allowed to visit the Israelis any time he wants. In 2011 the Left again backs Wilders on suggestions of surveillance of his Fitna project, even though the security service clearly rejected this task. GW as an unjust target of state power? Do Dibi, Pechtold and Recourt really know what they are doing?

The Netherlands, a stable parliamentary democracy, happens to be one of the most surveilled societies, in terms of the extent to which police and security services monitor private communications. In May 2008 the Ministry of Justice released figures that stated the number of telephone taps in the second half of 2007 reached 12491 in total. 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. And the Dutch figures concerned only the police – the security services fall outside of this assessment.

Remarkably, apart from long-running demands for openness from the Left, this activity is largely accepted in Dutch politics. But recently pressure has been building to make a breach in the secrecy wall surrounding the security services. The 2009 revelations of the AIVD tapping the phones of journalists at the Telegraaf [see 'Reflections on Davids: An Intelligence Affair,' The Holland Bureau, 31 January 2010 and thereafter] brought it into the public domain in a blaze of publicity. On 27 January 2010 three members of parliament submitted a motion demanding details on the extent of telephone and internet tapping by the Security and Intelligence Service (AIVD) and its military cousin, the MIVD. The response on 18 February was like seeing the tip of an iceberg – Minister for Home Affairs Guusje ter Horst, responsible for the security services, announced that the activities of the AIVD and the MIVD only represent a fraction of the total number of taps that are sanctioned by the Ministry of Justice. She also stated that while she indeed must declare information relevant for explaining certain policies, this could be refused should it damage the interests of the state.

Needless to say, giving away the details of telephone and internet taps by the security services would give away too much on their methods, and therefore falls squarely under the heading ‘national security’.

As a result, the parliament should trust in the workings of the respective oversight bodies, the Commission for the Intelligence and Security Services (CIVD) and the Review Committee for the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD). The CIVD is the parliamentary oversight committee for the services, which consists only of the respective leaders of the parties in parliament and is of course restricted in the information it can make public. As of 2010 the CIVD receives a review of security service activities every three months. The CTIVD (which has an English website) is an independent body established in 2002 to ensure that the activities of the security services fall within the bounds of European law (specifically to do with the protection of human rights). The Services can overcome European legal restrictions if they argue successfully to the CTIVD that they must do so in the interests of national security.

Of course, ter Horst insisted that questions of such a sensitive nature as tapping should be dealt with by these established channels and not announced for everyone to hear in parliament.

But information on security service activities can reach the public realm by a variety of channels, especially when their activities necessarily touch on the legitimate activities of businesses and other relevant parties. At the beginning of March the the National Management Organisation for Internet Providers (NBIP) released figures for 2009 that showed the AIVD and the Ministry of Justice tapped 335 times an internet or VoIP (Voice over internet Protocol) connection, involving in total more than 1.5 million end-users.  These 335 taps stretched for a total of 8920 ‘tap-days’ in 2009. This information was released via Webwereld.

NBIP was set up in 2002 in order to spread the costs of investments required for internet surveillance across participating Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The state requires that ISPs fulfill this task, and its costly. NBIP currently offers its services to 79 ISPs, among them Tele2 and BBeyond.

NBIP itself was involved in the tapping of 59 internet providers. But it can’t go any further than this – releasing details of which providers were tapped, or what the AIVD was after, would cross the line of state secrecy. But NBIP’s figures already give quite an insight into what is going on. Since the Organisation represents less than 10% of the landline and mobile provider market, these numbers can be multiplied by a factor of ten for a (very conservative) estimate of the national situation. That means a total of 3350 internet taps, stretching for 90,450 ‘tap-days’.

And these figures are on the rise. 2006 saw 69 taps on internet connections, covering 1.5 million end-users. From 69 to 335 in four years is a rise of 385%.

The Ministry of Justice announced in November 2009 that the national police corps will keep a record of all internet taps from 1 january 2010 onwards, and this information will be periodically released, as now occurs with details of telephone tapping. The first official report on internet tapping will be published this autumn. Once again, no details of AIVD or MIVD activity in this field will be made available.

Does all this surveillance lead to a reduction in criminality or subversive activities? The Ministry of Justice obviously thinks so. But ever-increasing surveillance also means ever-increasing amounts of information to be monitored. What is more interesting here is that, in a period when the German Constitutional Court ruled against a law that demands the retention of all telephone and email traffic for 6 months, and the European Parliament once again showed concerns about the transfer of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data for air passengers to the US and Australia, surveillance in the Netherlands carries on largely undisturbed. In a time when trust in the state is meant to be at an all-time low, this particular field of activity is yet to be fully challenged.