USA (300 million inhabitants): 2,208 telephone taps; the Netherlands (17 million): 26,000 taps
In a country with only 6% of the inhabitants of the United States, the department of Justice has performed as much as 12 times as many telephone taps on its citizens. We’re not referring to Zimbabwe or North Korea. No, this is the Netherlands, the country Bill O’Reilly is referring to as the most liberal in the world.
The Justice Department in the United States officially carried out 2,208 telephone taps in 2008. In the small country of the Netherlands it occurred more than 26,000 times. The Dutch minister of Justice Ernst Hirsch Ballin revealed these numbers today, after questions from the house of representatives. More reference data: the United Kingdom had 1,881 taps, Belgium had 3,603, France 26,000 and Germany 44,000.
Hirsch Ballin stressed that the data given didn’t include taps performed by secret service organisations. Their activity remains, yes indeed, a secret.
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Wow – this number definitely stood out to me. Bart, do you think the difference has anything to do with transparency? Sure, the US “official” figure is relatively quite low. But maybe it would be astronomically high if we knew more about what was *actually* going on…
Indeed, that might be the case. As stated, these are only the official figures. Most important, we don’t know anything about the activities of organisations like the CIA. You can only guess… (oops, do I hear a *click* on my phone?)
[...] stored in a central database, accessible by the Police. Scary, considering that the Netherlands has 12 times as much telephone taps on its inhabitants compared to the United States. It has to be noted that the EU legislation does not require this at [...]