Review committee: AIVD and MIVD made less mistakes last year jaar

In the past year, the General and Military Intelligence and Security services have unjustly tapped information less often than the year before. In particular, the tapping of third parties is often not motivated enough, according to the TIB assessment committee.

The Assessment Committee Deployment of Powers, or TIB, checked the number of times that the AIVD and the MIVD intercepted someone between April 2019 and April 2020. The TIB tested 2355 requests, the committee writes in an abridged annual report. In 1.7 percent of the times that the AIVD used a power, this was done unlawfully. For the MIVD this was 3.1 percent. That is an improvement from the previous year, when the intelligence services crossed the line in 4.5 and 5.8 percent of cases, respectively.

The TIB does not describe exactly what went wrong in those cases. Points of attention that remain with regard to the requests from both services include the correctness of the information contained in the requests, the use of special powers at the request of foreign countries and the description of the technical tools and technical risks associated with digital intrusion, especially where the intrusion of third parties and/or non-targets is concerned,” the committee writes. For the latter case, the review committee wants to draw more attention from the intelligence services by asking them for more substantiation.

The annual report of the TIB this year is much shorter than usual due to the corona crisis. The committee says it will come up with a more extensive report later this year. The intelligence services and thus the TIB work with state secret information, which means that meetings cannot be held remotely. The information in the annual report is therefore limited.