Police can now snoop Facebook, emails and text messages

Would you say some of the things you might say in a private email or a private posting on Facebook or MySpace, if you knew the police were intercepting it, and adding it to a dossier under your name?

This is the side of the phone tap laws they don’t want you to think about - the intrusion upon our daily lives and the erosion of our privacy.

Don’t say such surveillance can’t happen. Making it legal makes such surveillance inevitable.

The new laws, when implemented, will be a wakeup for all Queenslanders to be careful about what they say and send in private messages and emails because everything you say or send via a telecommunications system can be tapped.

Tight and transparent supervision of the monitoring process is essential and it is inevitable prosecutions stemming from intercepted information will be vigorously challenged in the courts.

Police may regard their new powers as a heavy hitting weapon against crime, but that’s a public relations message for the masses. The reality is that criminal trials in Queensland just became more complicated.