Goldsmith, the Government's senior law officer,
indicated that the current laws banning wiretap evidence could be
changed in a bid to fight organised crime.
"I'm personally convinced we have to find a way of avoiding the
difficulties," he said. "I do believe there are ways we can do
that. Otherwise we're depriving ourselves of a key tool to
prosecute serious and organised crime and terrorism".
Goldsmith is currently on a visit to the US where he has been
discussing the use of wiretap evidence with the attorney general
there, Alberto Gonzales. "What I'm being told here is that the
admissibility of intercept evidence is critical to some of their
most difficult cases," he told The Guardian. "They have put the top
five mafia bosses in prison as a result of it."
Official government policy is still to maintain the ban on
phonetap evidence, and security services and police have backed the
ban amidst worries that investigation techniques would become
apparent via the recordings.
Prosecutors have also traditionally worried about the lifting of
the ban because of the volumes of material that defendants might
request. "We may need help from the legislature and the judges to
avoid the agencies being swamped with irrelevant requests," said
Goldsmith.
The news of Goldsmith's change of heart comes as 20 Italians,
many of them police, were arrested over wiretap evidence abuse.
Phone company security chiefs and police are implicated in a case
involving the gathering of surveillance on celebrities, footballers
and politicians dating as far back as 1997.
Reports from Italy suggest that the leaking of wiretap evidence
to the press is commonplace in the run up to trials.
