OurColony.net

Privacy and the secrecy of telecommunications are widespread concerns of individuals and controlling telecommunications in order to prevent and fight crime is a pervasive concern of many states. The USA, Germany and the ECHR have employed fundamentally different methods to approach this apparent dilemma. Using discourse theory as a theoretical framework, the author of this text scrutinizes these three systems and the effectiveness of the solutions they have employed. She proposes patterns of reasoning which outline the role that the secrecy of telecommunications plays in constitutional democracies and which help to overcome the strains that new technologies inflict on both the need to protect privacy and on the necessity to control telecommuinications.