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(Updated: July 21, 2017) Since the Snowden revelations, we know that signals intelligence agencies are trying to acquire large sets of telephone metadata in order to analyse them in support of protecting their national security. Less known is that commercial companies also analyse similar big data sets, albeit for research purposes and with personal information being anonymized. Now, a research report from the Netherlands provides us with actual numbers of mobile telephone metadata, which can be used to compare with the numbers that NSA and GCHQ collected according to the Snowden documents. Tourist movements Recently published was a report about visitor movements in and around the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. It was prepared by the economic research company Decisio on behalf of the province of Noord-Holland and the municipalities of Amsterdam and Zandvoort. Since a few years, Amsterdam almost suffers from a huge increase of tourists, but it was difficult to get detailed insights in wh...

(Updated: July 26, 2017) About how signals intelligence agencies, like NSA and GCHQ, are intercepting communications, we learned a lot from the Snowden revelations and the German parliamentary inquiry, but also from new legislation in France , the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Much less is known about the practice of tapping by law enforcement, like for example the FBI and police forces. Now, a case from the Netherlands provides some interesting insights in how Dutch police intercepts internet communications - in a way that comes remarkably close to the bulk collection by intelligence agencies. - Cooperation with the Russians - Intercepting at Leaseweb - - Some questions - The end of ZeuS - Office of the Team High Tech Crime (THTC) of the Dutch police in Driebergen (photo: NRC/Merlin Daleman)   Cooperation with the Russians On Saturday, May 27, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant came with a surprising story about the cooperation between the Team High Tech Crime (THTC)...

( Updated : July 12, 2017) Since the Snowden-revelations, several countries adopted new laws governing their (signals) intelligence agencies, but instead of restricting the collection capabilities, they rather expand them. Previously we examined the new laws that have recently been implemented in France . This time we will take a look at the Netherlands, where a new law for its two secret services is now being discussed by the parliament. The situation in the Netherlands is different in at least two major aspects from many other countries. First, there is no institutional separation between domestic security and foreign intelligence as the two secret services combine both tasks. Second, the current law restricts bulk or untargeted collection to wireless communications only, so cable access is only allowed for targeted and individualized interception. - Secret services - Oversight bodies - Towards a new law - - Bulk cable access - Cyber security - Third party hacking - The headq...

(Updated: August 24, 2016) The Snowden revelations made people familiar with what NSA calls "selectors": phone numbers, e-mail addresses and a whole range of similar groups of characters that can be used to identify a particular target. However, very little was revealed about how exactly these selectors are used in order to pick out communications of interest. But meanwhile, declassified documents about NSA, German parliamentary commission hearings and an intelligence oversight report from The Netherlands give some details about that. It came out that the signals intelligence agencies of these three countries (and likely many other countries too) group all selectors that belong to a certain target into sets called correlations or equations. Wrapping individual selectors into equations makes sense, as one of the most important requirements for signals intelligence is of course knowing which phone numbers, e-mail addresses etc. a particular target uses, as often they will use m...

(Updated: January 1, 2017) With last year's news of NSA eavesdropping on the mobile phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel in mind, Dutch online media assumed it was big news that the Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte has a phone that cannot be intercepted. As was the case with chancellor Merkel, most people do not seem aware of the fact that political leaders usually have two kind of phones: an ordinary one that is easy to intercept and a secure one, that is very difficult to tap. That prime minister Rutte has a secure phone was said by the director for Cyber Security in a radio-interview last week. Afterwards this was seen a slip of the tongue, because the government has the policy to never say anything about the security methods they use. But from pictures and other sources we can still get a fairly good idea of which phones, both secure and non-secure, are used by the Dutch prime minister. As we will show here, he currently has three landline and two mobile phones at his di...