Netherlands Probes NSA Data Mining

The Netherlands has set up an investigation on the NSA issue and its association to Prism, a national security electronic surveillance program run by the NSA. According to the source, an ex-employee of the Dutch intelligence service, the NSA dug up data from email messages and social media postings aside from video and voice or group chats, stored data, pictures, and even PC log-in periods. Ondra  Soukup/flickr The country is the first European nation to start an autonomous inquiry on the extent of participation of its security services in the collection of information performed by the US government via the Prism spy programme. Dutch home affairs minister Ronald Plasterk enraged lot of MPs. Plasterk said there was data swap between services; sometimes intelligence took part in the data extraction through Prism. However, he denied security services use Prism to draw information by means of data flow in the Internet. Investigation leader D66 MP Gerard Schouw said he would like the committee inquiry to probe into how much confidential information of Dutch citizens was exposed and if it was against the law. He also said a significant amount of data mining is prohibited in the country. Source: Irish Times