On February 4, the Dutch government admitted that it was not NSA that collected 1,8 million metadata from phone calls of Dutch citizens, but actually their own military intelligence service MIVD. They gathered those data from foreign communications and subsequently shared them with partner agencies like NSA.
Just like everyone else, the Dutch interior minister was mislead by how Glenn Greenwald erroneously interpreted the data shown in screenshots from the NSA tool BOUNDLESSINFORMANT. This let him misinform the Dutch public and parliament too, and only after being faced with a lawsuit, he finally disclosed the truth. Here’s the full story.
Read more on Top Level Telecommunications. It’s a lengthy piece, and I’m in no position to verify its accuracy, but it’s certainly interesting and – if NSA wasn’t responsible for the metatadata collection in this case – the record needs to be set straight.