US Agency Tapped 1.8 Million Dutch Telephones

The United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) tapped 1.8 million Dutch telephones in one month year, Dutch technology website Tweakers reported. The U.S. secret agency tapped calls between the beginning of December and beginning of January. It rerecorded information about number and possibly location, according to Tweakers. NSA Headquarters The numbers were compared against a database of suspect numbers. The NSA takes calls automatically if someone calls to these numbers. The secret service also scans the text messages on certain keywords. In Germany, 500 million numbers were picked up by the NSA and 70 million in France. Le Monde reports that the NSA was allegedly targeting not only terrorist suspects but politicians, business people and others. In Netherlands, the number of phone taps rose 3% to nearly 25,500 last year, the justice ministry data shows.