🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct31.055303.19034@ucsu.Colorado.EDU>, fcrary@ucsu (Frank Crary) writes:
>voice is, accourding the Surpeme Court ruling, protected. However,
>this right ends, when it infringes other people's rights (thence
>the regulation of megaphones in public parks), further you have no
>right not to be _overheard_: If you broadcast your conversations,
>the government needs no warrent to listen it. 

In this country it is illegal for the police to do surveillance on
individuals (even on public places etc.) unless the individual is
suspected of a specific crime.  Now this doesn't mean a prohibition on
police patrolling on streets (or following a Usenet newsgroup I would
imagine by analogy), but a prohibition on police following somebody
and gathering information just because they don't like her, ie.
without a good reason (or a police officer routinely scanning all
posts by me because he doesn't like me).

In practice this has little significance, though - there's a specific
"ATARI" unit (from Ammatti- ja TApaRIkolliset, professional and
habitual criminals) dedicated apparently to just the prohibited act.
In response to doubts about the legality of the atari unit, the
official responsible for watching the legality of police action
commented roughtly what I say in the above paragraph, but apparently
the atari unit is still perfectly functional.

Also the Helsinki police drug unit maintains a file of aroung ten
thousand people, apparently including any anonymous tips, previous
convicts or suspects and so on.  People are removed from this file
only when they die - and when the drug unit finds out a person from
the file is dead, they promptly classify it as a "drug deaths" totally
regardless of the real reason of the death.  Gives some more money to
them to have many drug deaths, I suppose.  The legality of this file
also is very questionable under the "personal data protection act".

Then there are the spooks of course which are exempted of most of the
laws limiting surveillance.

(followups directed away from sci.crypt)

//Jyrki