Caught in the act

Some of the best plot twists in detective novels come when the suspect knows he's under surveillance but the police don't know he knows it. This shouldn't happen very often in the CR, because the cops should know that anyone with anything important to say already assumes he's being bugged. When Chief State Prosecutor Renáta Vesecká used misleading language to deny Interior Minister Ivan Langer's claim that 20 politicians and journalists were under wiretap regarding the leak of the Kubice- organized crime report, she thought she was safe. The plot twist came, though, when a police official, Tomáš Almer, admitted that eight people's phones were indeed being bugged. Eight isn't 20, so technically Vesecká wasn't lying, but she engaged in maximum obfuscation. Journalists who ran her worthless denial last week as news should "put her under surveillance" in the future and weigh her every word twice before believing it. [Czech Republic wiretaps wiretapping]