"Brazil cannot become a Big Brother and abolish privacy." The Order of Brazilian Attorneys, which has been critical of wiretapping both legal and illegal, seems to find that in order to maintain that libertarian position consistently, it has to come out strongly against O Globo's interception of private electronic communications between Supreme Court justices as well.

An O Globo photographer used a telephoto lenses to read the screens of justices using an intranet instant-messaging program during an important political corruption hearing. O Globo published transcriptions of selected conversation.

Which seems like a coherent enough position to take. I clip to file in order to have a decent sampling of the points of view on the case, pra inglês ver.

It is an interesting debate to read alongside our own domestic debate over warrantless communication intercepts and data mining and the like.

"Brazil cannot become an immense Big Brother in which privacy is abolished. Without privacy there is no liberty. Privacy is one of liberty's most fundamental manifestations."

Intranet networks are used the world over to facilitate internal communications — in private firms and in public institutions. Like the telephone, this tool is for private use.

The Supreme Court adopted an intranet so that the justices could, in strict privacy, exchange personal impressions with respect to legal proceedings. There is nothing illegal about this.

If there were, why would the Supreme Court spend public money installing an intranet in the first place? You might surmise.

What is illegal — and shocking — is the fact that such conversations would be violated by photographing computer screens, which is just an unacceptable as wiretapping the conversations of judges and attorneys to learn the contents of their conversations.

As if it were not bad enough that the police are truculent enough to place environmental bugs in attorney's offices, violating the law of professional confidentiality, which was implemented to protect the rights of clients, now the privacy of a judge presiding over a legal proceeding is violated.

In a recent case here, a photographer was jailed for contempt for photograhing jurors in a sensitive trial, potentially putting them at risk, according to the judge. The U.S. Supreme Court does not allow photography at its public sessions.