SIR,--This is a complex question and it is easy to
over-simplify it, but I think the Warden of All Souls is right. There is a distinction betwem the doctor's case and the barrister's.
The real reason for the public outcry in the barrister's case was that there was in effect a trespass by the police, a trespass on the privacy of a con- versation between two parties without the knowledge or consent of either. Up to that time it had been understood that a telephone-line, the connection once made, became property as private as any pre- mises. There was, in the result, the equivalent of a trespass upon premises. It was as if the police, without a warrant (which, since no crime had been established, I take it they could not have obtained), had broken into the house of one of the parties and listened to their conversation from behind a curtain.
The difference in the doctor's case (and here 1 dis- agree with your editorial comment on Mr. Sparrow's letter) is precisely that one of the parties consented to the eavesdropping. It was as if the lady in the case had invited the doctor to her house, having pre- viously arranged with the police to conceal them behind the arras, and then proceeded to extract from him the admissions they wanted. Here there is no trespass. It is simply a matter of the lady having consented to become a stool-pigeon, and I feel that if the barrister's case had never come to light there would have been no outcry about the doctor's.
1 agree with Mr. Sparrow that the Birkett Commit- tee did not deal with this type of case and that there- fore the police did not contravene its ruling. It follows that your leading article did not present the question fairly.
In saying this I do not attempt to condone the behaviour of the police on ethical grounds. That, I think, is a moot question. They were certainly 'snooping.' But to perform their duties effectively they must snoop on occasion. The problem is where to draw the line which makes the police right to snoop consistent with the liberty of the individual.—Yours faithfully, Spout wells House, Scone, Perthshire
D. H. CAMERON
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