3 investigation. Obviously, the protection of privacy is not limited to this matter. It goes much further than the illegal listening to private conversations by third parties. But this listening and the subsequent dissemination are the specific issue of the Case of Escher et al. The Court in no way criticizes the public authority’s interference in the space of individual liberty, the intimate and reserved zone, normally removed from unknown invasions or inferences, unauthorized and unwanted by the owner. It accepts the possibility of carrying out certain interventions, as it accepted, for a long time, the invasion of the home – the “inviolable sanctuary” – correspondence, and movement. 11. Nevertheless, the acceptance of this interference is conditioned by strict requirements that mark the frontier – in a democratic society – between the legitimate exercise of authority and the intolerable abuse of power. Those principles enter into play that legitimate the conduct of the authority, and their inobservance entails a violation of rights and involves the responsibility of those who fail to observe them. Evidently, the requirements that regulate the intervention in an individual’s privacy restrict the revelation of the findings derived from this intervention. Basically, intervention and revelation are the two sides of a single coin: invasion of private life, lawful or unlawful. The legitimate purpose that could justify the interception – or the interference in spaces of private life – ceases in the face of the unlawful dissemination of information that should have been known only by the authorities and safeguarded by them. 12. It is important that these issues have been brought to the fore by the ruling of a human rights court because, nowadays, interferences with privacy are increasing, as the ways to practice them multiply. And these ways do not always respect the principles set out above, in accordance with strict procedures and under the control of the authorities who should ensure protection of the rights – especially the judicial authorities – all based on the discourse that compares, in a false antithesis, public safety and fundamental rights. This inadmissible and dangerous rhetoric – which must be denounced constantly – proposes the decrease of right on the pretext of safety, or threatens the reduction of safety because of rights. On several occasions, I have challenged – and I do so again – this false dilemma, which jeopardizes the rule of law and the fundamental rights, and entails harm or danger to all. 13. To defend their excesses, the “classic” tyrants – allow me to use this expression – who oppressed many countries in our hemisphere, invoked reasons of national security, sovereignty, public peace. Based on this reasoning, they wrote their chapter in history. There was clearly an ideological component to their reasoning; there were powerful interests operating behind them. Other, more recent, forms of authoritarianism, invoke public safety and the fight against crime to impose restrictions on rights and to justify the infringement of freedom. With a biased discourse, they attribute the lack of security to the constitutional guarantees and, in brief, to the rule of law, to democracy and freedom. 14. In this regard, we should examine and assess any conduct that impairs the right to privacy, not to leave society unprotected – which would be absurd – but as a guarantee for its members. We have already indicated that there are channels, principles and conditions for restricting rights. Outside those channels, in the margin of those principles, without respecting those conditions, only authoritarianism prospers. We have not left the Orwellian “1984” behind us, even though the calendar may say so. It could be before us.