The National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV) will not be authorized to monitor citizens online. That appears from amendments to a bill which was sent to the House of Representatives on Friday. The proposal went back to the drawing board because the House wanted Minister Dilan Yesilgöz (Justice and Security, VVD) to limit the activities of the NCTV.
The change in law followed reports in NRC about abuses at the NCTV. The coordinator collected and distributed privacy-sensitive information about citizens for years without being allowed to do so. For example, the NCTV collected online expressions from left-wing and right-wing activists and religious leaders via fake accounts on social media, to write analyzes about them without a legal basis and to share them with other government agencies. Some people being tracked got into trouble because of this, without knowing the cause. Yesilgöz still wanted the NCTV to be authorized to collect this type of personal data, because otherwise the coordinator would not be able to perform its duties.
At first there were predominantly left-wing parties – SP, D66, Denk, GroenLinks, Bij1, PvdD and PvdA – against the expansion of the powers of the NCTV. Later the PVV and BBB joined them. The Dutch Data Protection Authority was also fiercely against the bill, which according to the privacy watchdog “opens the door for a surveillance society. All kinds of sensitive information about citizens is collected on a large scale, and without proper supervision”. Yesilgöz showed understanding for the criticism and said that the bill needed “some adjustment”.
No online research
That adjustment has now come. The cabinet has announced that the NCTV will lose its ‘analysis task’ and will only focus on coordinating Dutch terrorism policy, for which the organization was originally set up. In concrete terms, this means that NCTV employees are no longer allowed to process online expressions of citizens in their analyses.
Yesilgöz is not appreciated by everyone for limiting the powers of the NCTV. Former NCTV chief Paul Abels, who set up and led the analytics department for many years, responds on Twitter outraged that the analysis task has been ‘cracked’. “De facto, NCTV is thus made a meaningless and powerless body,” says the former NCTV top man.