Nadav Har'El wrote: > > However, look at the other powers the police have, which are far more serious > than searching of evesdropping. The police have guns, and can shoot you, for > example. Before a policeman shoots you, does he need to get written > authorization from a judge? No, of course not. But he knows that *after* the > fact, he will be judged, and if he abused his power, he's going to jail for > a long time. Yes, that is a valid argument. The main difference is, of course, that if a policeman shoots someone, the chances of no one related to the victim noticing are extremely small. Questions such as whether people are believed, whether the policeman can still walk even if he abuses power etc. are all good questions, but they are nullified by the major problem - with evesdropping, the chance of the police getting into any kind of trouble from which he will have to wriggle free are close to nill.
So, the above law could be improved by saying, for example, that anyone whose records are pulled will have to be notified (preferably by an automatic system) as soon as the investigation can allow it, but never later than a month after the information was pulled (unless a judge thinks further secrecy is still needed). Put that into the automatic system that does the evesdropping (and make sure that only someone from the judiciary system has the technical permissions to extend the one month expiry), and I think you may actually get a net improvement over the situation as it is today. Shachar ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
