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Isn't the Netherlands under even worse surveillance than the US? There were many top posts on HN over the last week suggesting this.

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Relatively, we probably have the highest number of phone taps in the world. In total there probably are over 25.000 phone numbers being tapped. Also, metadata of different types of communications are stored.

The scary word here is "probably", because the government consistently refuses to release that data.

Although I'm fairly confident we're gonna win the legal and political battle over that issue in time. The Dutch government may be no better than that of the US on an ethical level, the legal balance between privacy protection and state secrecy is very different.

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