Former privacy officer: the government has a culture of withholding
interview
Ben van Hoek Parts of the government are committing “large-scale obstruction” just to avoid disclosing information, says Ben van Hoek, the privacy officer at the police department until April.
- Authors
- Published onJune 15, 2022
- Reading time 5 minutes
What's the news?
- Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb has an investigation into the enforcement of the corona rules. deliberately kept out of publicity, because the 2022 municipal elections were coming up. This is evident from internal police emails and the former top police privacy officer, Ben van Hoek, said in a conversation with NRC.
- The police have the internal emails about delaying the report unfairly withheld from a WOB request, acknowledges the Rotterdam police.
The meeting at the police headquarters just ended when Ben van Hoek is talking to a colleague. The man says that he worked at the Ministry of Justice and Security. Van Hoek also introduces himself: he coordinated WOB requests with the police for years. “The Wób?” — the official laughs. Through this Public Administration Act, journalists try to request all kinds of internal information, he says. But this official is not participating in that. “You sometimes forget a document, don't you?”
It is typical of how large parts of the government think about transparency, says Van Hoek about his anecdote. According to the WOB lawyer, there is “large-scale obstruction” of the law that determines the openness of government information. Since the Benefits affair, which withheld information that was harmful to the tax authorities, the call for a more transparent government has grown. Last month, Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) got into trouble because he deleted almost all his texts, making them unretrievable. It is in line with the way ministries and municipalities work, says Van Hoek. “There is a culture of withholding.” Ben van Hoek (65) was a data protection officer at the police department until the end of April. He supervised compliance with the privacy rules. Last month, he retired after 44 years in the police force. He is participating in this interview because he wants the government to be more transparent. Before Van Hoek became a privacy supervisor, he worked on major investigations. For the National Investigation Service, he coordinated an investigation into the IRT affair, an infiltration process that got out of hand in the nineties, where the police themselves traded drugs. He was looking for construction fraud and fraud in the Rotterdam city hall when former mayor Bram Peper was suspected of letting the municipality pay private expenses.
Resistance
In 2010, Van Hoek joined the police's legal affairs department. From that moment on, he coordinated compliance with the Wob — passed into the Open Government Act (Woo) since this year. In principle, citizens and journalists can request all government documents by invoking that law, unless there are good reasons to keep them secret. Politically sensitive WOB requests submitted to the police went to Van Hoek. Within police units, there was resistance to making documents public, he says. “This was sometimes because they didn't want certain things to come out, but in the vast majority of cases because they dreaded the work of looking up documents. They preferred to spend that time catching crooks.” Van Hoek visited all units to explain to executives that they should not see the Wob as extra work. “It's part of accounting for the police task. It's part of our job.” The police are also getting better for it, says Van Hoek. For example, it was only after a WOB request that the high costs of farewell receptions came to light, after which a limit was set. “It saves the police tens of thousands of euros.” If employees kept refusing to provide WOB documents, Van Hoek switched to a different method. He asked the employees to sign a letter stating that the requested information was not in their possession. “Then those documents were in my mailbox the same day.” While the police leadership supported him, Van Hoek actually experienced resistance outside the police organization. To his surprise, ministries or municipalities in particular spoke openly about frustrating WOB requests and 'losing' sensitive documents. The first time he experienced this was during a meeting at the Ministry of Justice and Security. RTL News filed a WOB request in 2018 in connection with the MH17 shot down. “These were documents that were present at various ministries and the police — that's why I attended those meetings. It was clear that many documents had not been provided. A top official from the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management showed during the meeting that we should not look for more documents. “This remains everything,” he said. Everyone at the table knew: we're being cheated.” Yet no one intervened, says Van Hoek. Why didn't he do anything himself? “The police had provided everything. I had nothing to say about the ministries.”
Bonfires
Another example took place in The Hague. In 2019, there was a WOB request from RTL to the Hague police about the bonfires in Scheveningen that got out of hand. The unit found a document that was burdensome for then-mayor Pauline Krikke: she could have known that the bonfire could get out of hand. Van Hoek, now national WOB coordinator, had to resolve the situation. He consulted with officials from the municipality of The Hague. “During that meeting, one of the officials suggested pretending that the piece did not exist. “You don't have to say you have that document, do you?” , he said. I then made it clear to him that we don't work that way. The fact that a senior official proposes this says a lot about the culture there.” Van Hoek advised the police unit to publish the relevant document. He had no involvement in the further processing of the WOB request. Afterwards, it turned out that the unit chief had deleted all his apps about the bonfires. In the fall of 2019, Krikke resigned because of her role in the bonfires. More recently, Van Hoek, from his last position as data protection officer, heard about a municipality withholding information. During the lockdown in the corona pandemic, there were camera cars driving around in Rotterdam filming residents who did not comply with the corona rules, such as the one and a half meter rule. The Data Protection Authority (AP) launched an investigation and concluded that the filming municipal cars were in violation of the law: the invasion of privacy was too great. The AP wanted to release the outcome of the investigation at the end of last year to warn other municipalities that were planning the same. After consultation with mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb (PvdA), the police did not authorize early publication. As a result, the supervisor first had to enter a lengthy process, including determining the amount of the fine. As a result, the report is still not public, but was viewed by NRC. “Aboutaleb tried to slow down the investigation,” says Van Hoek. “In a meeting with the police, he said that the publication of the report should be lifted over the elections.” Internal mail traffic confirms his story. “Mayor suggests talking about the elections,” says a report from the triangular meeting about whether the police should agree to publish the report. This report was withheld by the police from an earlier WOB request from NRC. This was an “incorrect consideration”, says the Rotterdam police unit now. According to the police, the content of her own report is wrong. Not Aboutaleb, but the police chief would have said during the meeting that delay means that the report can only be discussed by the new city council — after the elections. Aboutaleb himself does not want to respond to questions. According to Van Hoek, the event shows how municipal authorities deal with transparency. “Preventing a publication because it does not suit the elections is not a motive that fits into a well-functioning democracy.” The government does not comply with its own rules about transparency, he says. This affects the authority and reliability of the public administration. “Why should citizens still comply with the law if the government doesn't do it themselves?” Take Prime Minister Rutte's recent remarks about deleting his text messages, says Van Hoek. “Some of it may have been private, but there were guaranteed messages about political decision-making. Even if such a text message only shows that the Prime Minister was informed about an issue, that information must be kept in accordance with the law.” He believes that this is how Rutte sends the wrong signal. If the prime minister throws away too much, officials will henceforth also destroy information sooner in the event of a sensitive WOB request. “The obstruction of the law will thus be further normalized. It is disastrous for trust in the government.”
Resume Ben van Hoek
Until April this year, Ben van Hoek was one of the top privacy officers at the National Police.. Before that, he was a national WOB coordinator within the police and controlled politically sensitive WOB requests. Van Hoek began his career with the police in 1979 as a street cop in The Hague.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of June 16, 2022.
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