Why protect office?

There are especially three reasons for protecting the office and telephone calls against surveillance:

the organisations which can carry out surveillance legally (subject, of course, to compliance with legal regulations):

Organisations according listed to the level of control over their surveillance operations
No control whatsoever	BIS Military Intelligence
No control	Office for Foreign Relations and Information Military police Ministry of Interior (inspection sections)
Subject to permission by a court of law media access excluded	Customs Administration which has 13 sections legally entitled to carry out surveillance operations
Subject to permission by a court of law media access not excluded	Czech Republic Prison Service Czech Republic Police Force

public sources provide only certain scattered information: in 2007 the Customs Administration carried out 1809 surveillance operations, which is about 33% of the surveillance operations carried by the Czech Republic Police Force but, at the same time, the Customs Administration investigated just 0.4% of the criminal offences compared with the number of investigations carried out by the Czech Republic Police Force. In this same year, there is an evidence of at least one case of the Military Intelligence providing information obtained from surveillance operations to the Police Force. As regards the number of surveillance operations carried out by BIS and other state agencies there are, of course, no statistics available.

Non-existence of legal norms regulating surveillance operations in the commercial sector. In the Czech Republic carrying out most types of surveillance operations is not a criminal offence. Even if the person is caught carrying out a surveillance operation, it does not mean that this person will be tried and sentenced at least in a civil court, not to mention a criminal court. What is more, all the organisations involved do not want to see these security incidents to be publicised. In majority of cases, however, it is not possible to find a perpetrator and for there reasons we may conclude that carrying out surveillance operations is de facto legal in the Czech Republic.
Increasingly higher quality of surveillance equipment is available at reduced prices. Most of the surveillance equipment, including the highly sophisticated equipment, is easily accessible at a low cost and can also be easily operated. All it takes to obtain a medium quality surveillance equipment is look on the Internet, call the security agency guarding your property, and for CZK 200.00 you can become an owner of a basic device. The high quality surveillance sets start from CZK 7,000.00. See Surveillance equipment.