Early in April, the Dutch Lower House silently approved of a change of the Telecommunication Law that lowers access barriers to personal data substantially. All 40.000 policemen will have the right to demand the name and address data of all telephony and internet subscribers. There is no need for the user to be a suspect, requests can be made in the general context of investigating serious crime.

Currently, access to the central database with the data of telephony subscribers is limited to the 500 public prosecutors (and the secret service). Internet providers in the Netherlands are not yet obliged to store the Name Address data of their users in this central database, but might become very eager to do so in the future, when faced with countless requests from police officers with little or no knowledge of internet.

The proposal also lowers the access barriers on traffic data. Public prosecutors no longer need judicial approval for demands to hand over traffic data or orders to analyse traffic data to produce the proper identity of a user.

Currently, there is no general legal obligation in the Netherlands to retain traffic data. There is only 1 specific measure obliging telephone companies to retain the location data of mobile telephony users for 3 months. New obligations however, can be introduced any time, without parliamentary approval.