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Netherlands: Surveillance techniques

01 March 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.