Not much time has passed since a scandal involving Spanish government assassination of Basque politicians. Japan passed a wiretap law in 1999 covering email and faxes as well as voice calls. India has considered a law allowing police access to Internet traffic without a warrant. Russia passed a law requiring all ISPs to let police look at any data they want in real-time, but a court declared it had gone too far. An Israeli court also ruled that military authorities require a court order before checking email.
Nobody trusts law enforcement in any country, of course.
Police have consorted with and protected criminals in places around the world from Boston to Karachi. And assurances by the FBI that Internet tapping will be restricted just like phone wiretaps by the courts fall flat as details of their Carnivore system are gradually uncovered. Traditional telephone technology allows specific devices to be installed by a phone company to record particular data about a particular phone. So Carnivore devices check all traffic, simply picking out particular user addresses and protocols according to the device's configuration. In fact, the descriptions leaking out of Carnivore make it sound like a sophisticated filtering device that offers tantalizing possibilities for increasing the effective surveillance capabilities of police, not restricting them.