The intelligence services of the AIVD and the MIVD are breaking the law by hiding data about citizens that have not been investigated for a long time. This is the conclusion of the intelligence watchdog, the Surveillance Commission of the Intelligence and Security Services (CTIVD). The data must be deleted.
It’s not about what critics call the “clear,” where intelligence agencies can get many people’s data at once through untargeted eavesdropping on the Internet. Rather, it is a large amount of private data that the service receives, for example through a hack. The impact of such a ‘mass dataset’ on privacy can be comparable to, or even greater than, the impact of eavesdropping on the internet.
For example, an intelligence agency could hack into a telecommunications provider to get the bills of all customers and then get the call histories of would-be terrorists. An email provider can also be hacked. It is unclear what kind of data is involved; can be interesting for both Dutch and foreigners.
“The law says that this data can be kept for a year and a half, but they have kept it much longer,” said Addie Stehouwer, complaints manager of the CTIVD. “This includes data they know will never be relevant.”
Obliged
The decision came after a complaint from the action group Bits of Freedom. It’s not the editor’s first warning, but now the decision is final. “We are very happy with the decision and the fact that this data now has to be destroyed,” said Lotte Houwing of Bits of Freedom.
The fact that data now really needs to be erased is due to an inconsistency in the Intelligence Act. If the CTIVD conducts its own investigation, the accountant may only give an opinion. In principle, the government and parliament have nothing to do with it. However, if someone files a complaint, the accountant can make a binding decision.
“We complained because the services were breaking the law, but the ministers did nothing,” Houwing said. “It’s problematic that this is happening and our monitoring system cannot solve it alone.”
One and a half year
According to the regulator, intelligence services store data of ‘innocent’ citizens for too long when they get their hands on an aggregated set of data. Services have a year and a half to extract interesting data from such a dataset, the rest has to be thrown away, but that doesn’t happen: instead, all or most of it is kept.
In practice, it is not possible to evaluate huge data sets within one to one and a half years of legal time. This is why services label all data sets as “relevant”; according to this logic, all data can be kept, even if it contains citizen data that is not at all relevant to an investigation.
It is not the first time that the CTIVD has warned that the law does not allow this. As early as 2019, the CTIVD wrote that dealing with huge data sets is wrong. In 2020, the services received another blow and the CTIVD decided that a set of data sets had to be destroyed. Then it didn’t.
goat path
However, the Ministries of the Interior and Defense have proposed a legal goat route to allow services to work with datasets, as they deem it crucial. But not only the service does not meet the conditions of this goat path, the way of the goats is also not good, the CTIVD writes.
The regulator has examined five datasets in more detail, whereby neither the AIVD nor the MIVD have clearly demonstrated the usefulness of the datasets for research. AIVD employees also had much easier access to datasets than expected.
Enhanced surveillance
Touching is also done under a magnifying glass. The CTIVD previously announced that it would closely monitor large-scale eavesdropping. Since this tightened supervision, the departments have again broken the law: they have listened more than they could, the CTIVD wrote in the House on Friday.
In the meantime, the government wants to temporarily give the intelligence services more powers to investigate digital threats. De Volkskrant also wrote, which passed the law, that services can more easily find and extract aggregated data sets.
The AIVD does not want to respond to the decision; Could not reach the MIVD for comment.
Source: NOS
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