Wiretaps for everyone

One of our readers recounted how he received a CD of his own telephone calls in the mail, as a warning from an adversary in a legal dispute. "We've got the means to ruin you," was the message. Deputy Police President Jaroslav Macháně suggested in HN today that such wiretaps are okay, as long as they're conducted by private detectives. He said there'd be no legal basis for taking action against a private company if it had tapped the phone of Stanislav Gross's former right-hand man, Zdeněk Šarapatka. Unauthorized wiretaps aren't specifically dealt with in the penal code, he said. Lawyer Tomáš Sokol, also writing in HN today, clearly disagrees. Wiretaps are legal, he said, only if they're approved by a court. However, Macháně is suggesting that anyone - including, for example, the prime minister's associates - can get away with a wiretap, as long as they hire a private sleuth to do the dirty work. eavesdropping