Investigation services tapped twenty Xs4all connections in 2013

The police and the investigative services had an internet connection tapped at Xs4all twenty times last year. This is evident from the transparency report that that provider has released. Taps by the intelligence services are not included in this.

In addition to twenty internet connections, 40 telephone lines were tapped at the provider, according to the transparency report. An e-mail account was also ‘tapped’ once. In addition, the police and investigative services successfully requested nineteen times metadata about e-mail or internet telephony, such as who had contact with whom.

In addition, the police and investigative services received two ‘forensic copies’, for example a copy of a hard disk; it is unclear what kind of hard drives are involved. Xs4all states that it only cooperates with claims that it believes are legally correct, but it is unknown how many claims the provider rejects.

The statistics do not provide a complete picture, partly because Xs4all is not allowed to include the progress of secret services in the overview. In addition, it is unknown how often the name and address details of internet customers are requested: every day internet providers upload their entire customer file to the police, and it is impossible for the providers to check how often these are searched. The customer files are kept for a maximum of one day; Xs4all’s report shows that the police and the investigative services asked for older, so-called historical customer data 68 times.

Xs4all calls on the government to release its own statistics about surveys of internet providers, among other things to prevent differences of interpretation at other companies that issue their own transparency reports.