"There are several reasons why privacy takes on particular significance now. First, the effect of technology in providing challenges to the relationship between privacy and criminal law is not restricted to dealing with new mechanisms for surveillance. In the areas of genetic and information technology, the questions which have arisen are whether the classical doctrines of the criminal law (homicide and assault law in the case of genetic technology, criminal property law in the case of computer crime) are sufficient, or whether a new “corpus” of law is appropriate to either case. In either event, there are significant privacy implications. Developments in information technology make it far easier to obtain and disseminate information about peoples' pasts. Moreover, the Internet has radically altered the force of “the public” by allowing the collection and dissemination of materials that, while formally public, were not widely available. It has given rise to claims to privacy of information. It has now also generated claims from law enforcement agencies to encryption keys to decode encrypted emails and prohibitions upon anonymous and pseudonymous Internet use. The second important precipitation has arisen from concern for the “legality of police behaviour” in combination with a “move from reactive to proactive policing”, striking most specifically at drugs but more generally, increasingly, at “organised crime”. Reactive policing takes place in response to reports of crime. It involves the traditional policing techniques of interrogation, searches, seizures and so on of which the suspect is immediately aware, and by police officers whose status and identity the suspect knows. In a system of reactive policing the traditional guarantees of rights to the suspect may or may not in fact be available, but it fairly clear what they would involve. In adversarial systems, due process provides an argument for the right to be informed of one's rights, for access to legal advice, some knowledge of the prosecution case, the right to have interviews recorded and the right to know when an interview is taking place and when it is being recorded. In inquisitorial systems too, the suspect has the right to remain silent, although legal aid may not be immediately available (in the Netherlands, for example, a suspect has no automatic right to have a lawyer present during police interrogation)."
January 1, 1970