There's a long AP wire story on wiretapping in Europe; see
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040800529.html
There are a number of intriguing statements in the article. For
example, in Italy 106,000 wiretaps were approved last year. By
contrast, in the US there were only about about 1,700 wiretaps in 2004.
(That number does not include Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
wiretaps. It is also unclear to me if the Italian number represents
calls tapped, as opposed to court orders issued, which is what
the US number represents.)
Italian prosecutors strongly defend the need for wiretaps, but called
the recent warrantless NSA wiretaps illegal under our judicial traditions.
A study at the Max Planck Institute said that Italy, followed by the
Netherlands, does the most wiretapping. One of the authors said:
wiretaps are much more common on the European continent than in
Britain or the United States, where he said there is a more
institutionalized mistrust in the relationship between civil
society and a state-organized judiciary.
He said research showed that wiretaps are often used to support
weak cases and seldom help to achieve a guilty verdict.
The more wiretaps are used, the lower the conviction rates, he
said.
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