The police regularly break the rules when asking for information about suspects’ telephone calls, the national privacy watchdog CBP said in a new report published on Thursday.

There were mistakes in nine out of 11 requests made by the national detective force during random sampling, while five out of 11 requests made by The Hague police also contained errors, the report said.
Telecom providers are required by law to hand phone traffic details over to a central data bank which police can access as part of a criminal investigation.
The CBP said the police made 2.9 million requests for phone information in 2009, compared with 1.7 million requests in 2007.