Gregorio Miguel Pallugna UNLESS you are an uncivilized person, to some degree you must expect to have some privacy. You certainly must expect that your conversations with your wife in the bedroom will not be exposed to the public, or that your personal jokes with your drinking group will not be recorded, or your emails to a friend complaining about your boss will not end up in your boss’ inbox. Privacy has been a shared value of society for so long a time but up to this date its scope and extent is still unclear to many of us, even to our law enforcers. No less than the Constitution protects the fundamental and basic right of all individuals to privacy in their communications and correspondence. Specifically, it states that “the privacy of communication and correspondence shall be inviolable except upon lawful order of the court, or when public safety or order requires otherwise as prescribed by law... Any evidence obtained in violation of this or the preceding section shall be inadmissible for any purpose in any proceeding.” Clearly, no intrusion into any person’s privacy is allowed unless there is a lawful order of the court or when there is a law allowing it in the interest of public safety or public order. What happens then if there is no such law or court order? Anything taken from the illegal intrusion into a person’s private communication cannot be used in any proceeding. This is the extent of protection given to us under the Bill of Rights. In fact, the Supreme Court itself has unequivocally declared that the right to privacy is “a right most valued by civilized men,” and must therefore be protected at a very high cost. Perhaps the most celebrated case involving the protection of privacy is the American case of Katz vs. US where FBI agents wiretapped a public telephone booth in order to record several conversations of Katz upon suspicion that he was illegally sharing gambling information to other individuals. The federal agents got what they needed but the US Supreme Court ruled that the evidence could not be used against Katz because it was illegally acquired in violation of Katz’s right to privacy as provided under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. The Katz ruling, which has been adopted in several decisions of our own Supreme Court, teaches us that when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy concerning a particular correspondence or communication, there can be no valid intrusion into such privacy without first securing a warrant from the court. Another case, this time a local one, is that of Zulueta vs. Martin where the wife ransacked the clinic of her husband and took from the cabinets several correspondence including letters to the husband’s paramours, several greeting cards, diaries and photographs. The wife then used these documents in court as proof of her husband’s infidelity. The Philippine Supreme Court however ruled that these cannot be used as evidence against the husband because they were acquired in violation of the husband’s right to privacy. Not even the wife is exempted from respecting the husband’s right to privacy. Most of us feel that the government has a very wide leeway in taking information from individuals in the guise of law enforcement. The truth however is that government officials cannot extract any communication or correspondence from us without a valid court order or law requiring us to comply. Not even emails or text messages linked to the commission of a crime can be taken without first securing an order from the Court. To seize an envelope of letters, a laptop or a cellular phone is one thing, to read its contents is another. Anything produced from such an invalid extraction becomes thin air in the eyes of our legal system and cannot be considered as evidence for any purpose. So, the next time law enforcers or suspicious wives want to seize letters or electronic communications to be used as evidence in any proceedings, they should remember to first secure an order from the court. It pays to know your rights.