When I first opened the Belgian State Security Report 2008 (PDF in French or in Dutch), I had the a feeling of déjà vu: the cover picture is in fact a part of the Great Court of the British Museum in London, UK. Strange for a report on Belgian security and surveillance …

Comparison between an actual photo of the British Museum Great Court (left, by Guillermo Viciano, under CC-by-sa) and the cover of the Belgian State Security Report 2008 (right)

Then I saw it’s only a light version for the web, not the full version. I had a look at the Justice website and the Security web page but I couldn’t find the original version (if you have the full version, I’m interested).

The report summarizes all the activities done by the Security in 2008, including the groups, countries and activities watched, a report on the cases where it was involved (Belliraj, Benali, Trabelsi cases, a.o.) and a broad view of what they did to check people background, protect some others and check various accreditations.

The most interesting part for me, however, was a short description of a bill about data collection methods by the Security. This bill was submitted to the Belgian Senate in December 2008 and was recently adopted (the full text is here, in French). It’s now submitted to the Belgian king for signature.

Briefly, this bill modifies an existing law from 1998 and, among other things, tells apart ordinary data collection methods from specific (articles 18/7 and 18/8) and exceptional ones (articles starting from 18/9). As expected, the bill allows the use of techniques to intercept and read private communications between persons. The bill also allows entering into computer systems, removing protections, installing spyware, decrypting and collecting data (but it does not allow their destruction).

All these methods are controlled post hoc by two different bodies, an ad hoc administrative commission composed of magistrates (renewed each year by the king following a suggestion by the government) and a permanent “R” committee. Specific and exceptional methods needs to be approved first by the administrative commission but there is always the possibility for the Security hierarchy to bypass this and send a written notice to the commission later on. How many times can this last step be forgotten?

Although it’s nice to have the reference to the bill and be able to look for it on the internet, I would have liked to see some statistics about how many times these specific and exceptional measures were applied, how many times they were refused by the administrative commission, how many times the hierarchy allowed a mission and informed the commission later on, etc. in the same way they proudly show graphs of the number of hours spent protecting VIPs. I know details are protected by secret but it would still have been nice to have an idea on how often these methods are used.

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