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The country with the most surveillance laws in the books and the most documented phone taps is probably not the most surveilled country on earth (at least, for
by bee_rider 1y ago
The country with the most surveillance laws in the books and the most documented phone taps is probably not the most surveilled country on earth (at least, for the worst countries I expect law enforcement to just do whatever they want and not leave a paper trial because… why would they bother? Nobody is going to scrutinize them anyway).
Of course, this puts the conversation in a tricky spot. The less-bad actors (no country is great in this context) should have the most well documented abuses, the worst will just do it without bookkeeping. So it is, unfortunately, a “prove a negative” sort of thing.
- jeroenhd 1y agoI think the difference between the Netherlands and other countries is that the Netherlands is quite open about the amount of phone taps they place. You'd be crazy to think other countries don't tap phone lines at the same rate or worse. As bad as the surveillance situation here is, it's still better than the situation in the UK, of that I'm sure. Unfortunately, I can't find any very recent data about wiretaps in the UK. The 2023 report (https://ipco-wpmedia-prod-s3.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/E03270100-HC_603-IPCO-Annual-Report-2023-Web_Accessible.pdf https://ipco-wpmedia-prod-s3.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/E032...) shows a sharp rise in communications data applications (441,900 in 2023 alone) but those can range from single phone calls to months of data collection. The Dutch reports only claim 5397+1258 phone taps in 2024, but those don't say anything about their daily volume. If your government's wiretaps per capita is lower, double check that they're not using coded language to exclude most of their activities, and if the numbers are much lower, think twice before taking them for their word.