Holland: Surveillance techniques
01 January 1991
Holland: Surveillance techniques
artdoc June=1994
A commission on police matters in the Dutch parliament agreed on
7 March, 1994 to approve a bill that would allow the police to
bug or otherwise monitor conversations in any location provided
there were clear indications that crimes were being planned. At
the moment the police are only allowed to monitor telephone
conversations. However, last year the police managed to overhear
conversations in a room because suspects left the telephone
`accidentally' off the hook in an unusually large number of
cases. For political activists the new situation will not make
much difference because the security service (BVD) are already
allowed to bug any premises.
In a recent case in Haarlem the police traced the movements and
activities of a suspected drug dealer by using a `shadow' beeper
that printed out all the messages received. The police technical
department had constructed the monitoring equipment, and no
permission was requested from the investigating magistrate for
its use. The court now has to pass judgment on the legality of
this surveillance technique.
PTT Telecom has almost completed a system that will allow the
police to monitor separate car and portable telephones by number.
The maximum simultaneous monitoring capacity of the system will
be 180 telephones, which some sources in the police say is not
enough because of the widespread use of car phones by suspected
criminals. The new system will do away with the present practice
by which the police monitor all car phones in a given area by
radio scanners to subsequently identify their targets through
voice recognition, a method that has brought many protests from
lawyers and the general public because it involves violating the
privacy of many citizens.
Statewatch Vol 4 no 2, March-April 1994