In a recent opinion piece published in the newspaper AD Haagsche Courant Henk van Essen, chief constable of the Haaglanden police department, argued that it’s perfectly acceptable for citizens to post photos, or videos, on the Internet of suspects who are implicated or involved in very serious crimes. He stressed, however, that these photos and videos should serve the investigation and that citizens should take due care. Van Essen sees no problem with this approach, arguing that if citizens employ thoughtful, analytic discretion it’s “a healthy form of citizen participation.”
Equally unsettling are the comments Van Essen made as regards privacy. “As far as I’m concerned,” Van Essen states in the same opinion piece, “the right to privacy is not an absolute right.” He continues, “[Y]ou do not have to earn it [the right to privacy] in the Netherlands, but you can most certainly lose it. For example, when you commit serious offenses and cause substantial injury to others. You, then, run the risk of forfeiting your own rights and [in that case] those of the victim take precedence.” It makes you wonder whether Van Essen has the same enlightened idea about “freedom.”
“Of course, these online videos of suspects must not lead to vigilantism,” the chief of police continues. “However, I don’t think that’s the main point. [Online] videos should facilitate the identification, detection, arrest and prosecution of the suspects.”
Van Essen’s statements come hot on the heels of various articles highlighting, in the case of the Boston Marathon bombings, the limitations of the “wisdom of the crowd” theory.
Image taken from the DHPOCO Tumblr
Van Essen’s comments go directly against the directive of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, which in 2011 called for hefty fines for spreading pictures of suspects online. As it stands, the Public Prosecution department is extremely reluctant to distribute footage of suspects.
The chief constable’s statements concerning privacy coincided, incidentally, with the news that the police in The Hague was using hidden high-tech equipment to spy on citizens. During a routine maintenance job technicians of Ziggo, an Internet service provider, discovered a street cabinet containing professional spying equipment, i.e. a camera, a recording device, and UMTS modem. The street cabinet, which is identical to the cable cabinets the Internet service provider uses, was located near the Oranjeplein in the neighbourhood Schilderswijk, a well-known racialized space (“zwarte wijk”) with a large Muslim community, in the city of The Hague.
Image source unknown
Police institutions subject entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crime.
The police stated that the Public Prosecution department had given permission to place spying equipment, the use of which is regulated by law, in the neighbourhood. According to the official statement the high-tech devices were deployed for the purposes of an investigation into property crime. However, no further clarifying statements could be made because the investigation is still ongoing. The police did say that the investigation has nothing to do with the possible recruitment of young people for the armed struggle in Syria or elsewhere in the world.
Monitoring and intercepting “Islamic extremists” remains, according to a recent article in the newspaper NRC, the purview of the Dutch Intelligence Service AIVD. Like many other institutions the AIVD has been hit by austerity cuts, and it’s currently assessing which intelligence responsibilities in the field of radicalism and extremism it can transfer to regional intelligence services of the national police. While the investigation on jihadist terrorism and the radicalization of Dutch Muslims remains an important issue, the AIVD will concentrate as well on investigating anti-fascists, violent anarchists, animal rights extremists, and extremists who oppose the asylum and immigration policy.
A protestor is being arrested outside a detention facility in Rotterdam for drawing a flower on a wall, and for not showing ID. People were protesting against the Dutch government’s neglect of the human rights of refugees. At the moment, around 45 refugees are on a hunger- and thirst-strike in this detention facility.
In essence, surveillance boils down to the management of targeted groups, based on the demands of capitalism and the nation-state. The (hidden) intention of intelligence services is not only to gauge which citizens are likely to commit a crime based on their attitude, fashion, age, race, gender and other characteristics, but also to actively sanitize public space. In order to “pre-empt” crime the police is relying, more and more, on risk-assessment techniques to identify whom and where to search and these risk-assessments represent sharp intersections of White Autochtoon Dutch patriarchal authority, racism, militarism, and classism.
It’s undeniable that the expansion of surveillance techniques in pursuit of “security” and “safety” has put a strain on privacy and civil liberty. Oppressive techniques of policing (preventive policing, like “random” stop-and-search and area search operations) are driven by the desire to identify and rest on the thought that there is a possibility that something might happen. Actuarial methods in criminal law, i.e. statistics working as a basis in law enforcement, underpin many contemporary policing techniques. In its desire to identify the “unknown” in multicultural Dutch society the police has come to depend on technology-based solutions. For instance, the Dutch police regularly uses drones, unmanned surveillance aircraft, in their fight against crime—the use of drones in civilian surveillance was agreed back in 2009. This policing technique is the latest in a long line of repressive measures to control public space. Under the rubric of “crime prevention” these invasive and unwarranted operations have become a new strategy of controlling public space through a “militarization of risk.”
The desire to identify the “unknown” and “unpredictable” is now closely tied to “national security” and “the fight against crime” and the line between the two is increasingly blurred. The Dutch government has been relentlessly flirting with materializing “the glass citizen,” i.e. a “transparent citizenry,” a population whose actions are readily identifiable and easily monitored. Last year the Mayor of the city of Amsterdam Van der Laan considered placing mobile full-body scans in public space. The police researched the possibility to implement mobile body scans and argued that these so-called scan poles, which peer through clothing, would be a good addition to preventive searches.
In a recent draft Bill, which has been issued for consideration to Parliament, government shamelessly pushes for a more thorough exchange of data on citizens between various bodies; the goal is to create a more comprehensive profile of citizens in order to limit and dissuade fraud. What’s more, Minister of Justice Opstelten has proposed a new law for enhanced cyber-surveillance and counter-hacking, which will grant the police the license to listen in on Skype calls.
Near-constant surveillance is positioned as the primary solution to terrorist threats and crime. Since 9/11 the terrorism alert level has been raised, on several occasions, to “substantial,” even though, as Reuters reports, the Netherlands has not suffered a major “terrorist” attack. Raising the terrorism alert level, a move to justify the invasive level of surveillance, is what Peter Marcuse would call a false response. The murder of Theo van Gogh is commonly cited as an act of terror. And despite its shocking impact on the nation, it was a violent act directed at one individual. On the other hand, the 2009 attack on the Dutch royal family and the 2011 mass shooting in Alphen aan den Rijn did not trigger the same public response. In both cases violence was perpetrated by White Autochtoon Dutch men; one of whom had had contact with the police.
“This racialization of what is represented as terrorism is an attempt to bring the old style racism into conversation with modes of repression in the 21st century.” Angela Davis
Popular images and imaginings of a “safe” Dutch nation mutually construct race, class, gender, and a normative sexuality. Security is increasingly seen as a problem of public space, and Othered bodies are framed as “unknownable” and, thus, as a public threat. And these suspect (“terrorist”) bodies are established through invasive racial profiling and police harassment. Much of modern-day surveillance, though, takes place through softer, less obtrusive means; it is a matter of routine (think of the public transport chip card). It is a well-known fact that the Netherlands “sanctions more phone taps per head of population than any other country in the world.”
Visibility has become a matter of social, economic and political importance, and a deep-seated feature of any modern, technologically advanced society.
During the Mayday demonstration in Rotterdam the police photographed and filmed the people who marched:
Dissent in public space is not only carefully monitored, it is also carefully managed.
During the investiture ceremony of king Willem-Alexander anti-monarchists were allowed to protest in only six designated demonstration sites. Joanna van der Hoek and Hans Maessen were arrested for peacefully protesting against the monarchy on the dam square—even though the municipality had granted them permission (!) to protest on the dam square.
In 2011 a group of women and men who wanted to protest silently against Zwarte Piet, the racist element in the Dutch celebration of Sinterklaas, were arrested before the protest had even begun. A woman filming the police was violently arrested.
The underlying message is that we should be visible only in sanctioned ways; as citizens, we are expected to exercise our freedom of speech in designated spaces and only when permission is specifically and expressly granted. The doggedness with which public space is managed is probably best captured in a bizarre news item about a grandmother of two toddlers who was fined € 130,- because her grandchildren picked flowers from a municipal flower bed.
The active management of public space and the unbridled power of the police are disquieting, to say the least. Prof. J.P. van der Leun states that unlike in the UK, the use of stop and search powers are not being monitored in the Netherlands. Meaning, the use of invasive “preventive” policing techniques is left to the discretion of police officers.
It seems that what is being surveilled, policed, and secured are social relations, institutional structures, and cultural attitudes. Any perceived deviation from the set norm suggests deviant behaviour. “Non-Western Allochtoon” is a priori suspect. Moreover, ongoing social inequities offer rationales for increased, invasive surveillance of marginalized groups. The move, for instance, to criminalize undocumented migrants along with the naming practices (the use of illegal instead of undocumented) sanctions the continuous dehumanization of refugees and legitimizes oppressive policing measures, which result in the wholesale imprisonment of undocumented migrants. Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that the police has an “illegal immigrant arrest” quota—a quota which it failed to meet last year, as reported by Dutchnews.nl. Any opposition to these oppressive systems of control is recast as extremist and possibly “terrorist.”
However, the freedom from fear and want, which these measures purport to safeguard, has become virtually unattainable in a world where job security is tenuous and in which the economy, it seems, is eternally on the verge of collapse. What is security in the age of precarity?
