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U.S. Wiretapping Surges 19%
linuxwrangler writes "Court authorized wiretaps in the U.S. surged 19% in 2004 to 1,710. Court orders relating to terror-related investigations are not included in the wiretap statistics and those warrants reached a record 1,754 last year. Apparently judges have found that law enforcement is unbelievably perfect as they rubber-stamped approvals on every single request they received."
..cell phones? Can they 'tap' a cell phone?
-Valiss
"We're still seeing a huge trend toward increased surveillance," said Edgar. In another story, a company called fake alibi is spreading its wings.
This makes a certain sense. Law enforcement, both police and judges, must feel they are on the same side and under siege by the forces of crime. After all, that's all they see and work with every day. So just as units of soldiers bond and stand up for each other, I imagine it must be tempting for judges and police to bond, or at least feel they are both working the same job from different angles. So they are probably predisposed to think the police know what they are doing when they ask for a wire-tap. Most of the time, they are probably right.
But yeah, it sure does allow the slip-ups (and the occasional outright corruption) to get through mostly unchallenged. That's the downside, and a good reminder why a citizen should never give their governing structure any kind of power without realizing they will use that power early and often and repeatedly, and when someone becomes corrupt it will get used in a corrupted manner. And with very little in the way of real checks and balances in a practical sense.
You would think with nearly 2000 requests, at least ONE might be found without merit, no?
I don't usually wear a tinfoil hat, but that scares me.
1754... that's all?
Even though these numbers don't include terror investigations (which are no doubt being used quite liberally [that kid who shoplifted from the Seven Eleven **might** be doing it to feed terrorists]) the net effect is that people still feel threatened and feel that intrusions are part of the "War on drugs/terror/whatever".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There's 300 million people in the US, and there were less than 2000 wiretaps. That's one wiretap per 150,000 people...that seems mighty low to me, especially since I live in a drug-infested suburban town with a whopping 5,000 people which therefore had a 1 in 30 chance of ANY wiretapping at all in the past year, as I would say that my town is no more likely to have a wiretapping than the average, but I could certainly imagine one being needed. It seems to me like saying, "Holy shit! Wiretappings have risen from 10 to 100 in the US in the past year! that's a 900% increase!" It's too small for an increase of any size to make much difference.
It doesn't say "law enforcement," it says "designated competent authority." In practice, after subpoenas reach a certain volume, "designated competent authority" comes to mean "anyone who sends us a fax which looks half-assed reasonable and answers their phone number 'Sgt. Fibber, Metro Police,' whereupon we will email your recordings of all your Skype calls to their hotmail account."
A common mistake everybody makes when looking at statistics like these is to forget about the baseline.
As they said in the article, this increase is probably due to the increase in how much various kinds of wireless devices (cellphones, blackberries, etc. ) are being used by criminals. If you wanted to confirm this, you'd have to see whether there really was such an increase. Does the general population use these kinds of devices 19% more this year than last? Do criminals? Perhaps they have been increasingly using them over several years, and only now have the police started to modify their tactics. You can only build up an argument that there is in fact an increase in "big-brotherish" surveillance if the number of such wiretaps goes well beyond the "need" for them.
More disturbing is the claim that Judges didn't reject a single request. This seems very wrong at first - especially when you have cop shows in the back of your mind where the crusading good-hearted but somewhat over-enthusiastic cop goes out searching for warrants from an old level-headed judge with flimsy evidence. It seems that there should be at least a few of these warrants which are rejected. Does are image of cops meet the reality? AlexB892 points out that it is seen as bad for a cop's career to have a wiretap requst rejected. Are cops really so diligent? Again - look to the baseline. What is the average number of rejected requests in any one year - these stats must be available somewhere. If you find that the average is only one or two rejections per year, then it seems reasonable that in any one year there might not be any at all. However, if it is much higher, you might question whether judges aren't being diligent enough in their scrutiny of the cops.
Always take statistics with a grain of salt - they're only numbers, and can be interpreted in many ways. If they're presented in the right way, they can seem to be strong evidence for some growing trend - but you really need other figures which give you the "context" to see if this is realistic - or just somebodies rhetoric.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin