To paraphrase Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, "a specter is haunting Poland-the specter of wiretapping." It has suddenly turned out that almost everyone is being bugged in this country, because nine of Poland's 12 police-style security services are authorized to plant bugs and taps. In addition, an awful brouhaha arose when it came to explaining who, when and in what circumstances may resort to wiretapping-and who authorizes and supervises such practices.

It also turns out that the security services are in fact overt, or at least the results of their bugging work are, because they immediately find their way to the press, and from there to all the other media.

America may have had its famous journalist duo Evans and Novak, who exposed some of the greatest secrets of politics, the memorable Valachi Papers, and Deep Throat of Watergate fame, but in Poland secrets tend to spectacularly leak out all by themselves.

Initial public curiosity quickly turns to boredom. The real danger is not the bugging mania, or the disclosure of secrets, but that one day we may become indifferent to it all and won't even notice when we lose a significant part of our rights and accept the abnormal as normal.