Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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.
Of course not! Feel free to keep using your cell phone for drug deals and terrorist chatter, Valiss...
Or should I say, Bin Laden! Thought you could hide behind a high Slashdot UID, did ya?
Seriously, though, cellular "wire" taps are trivial. They can usually go through the carrier, or they can use receiving equipment if they're in the same cell to query the cell tower and intercept you there.
Since the advent of digital cellular, though, you need more equipment and expertise needed to tap a cellphone. So the good news is that you don't really have to worry about anyone besides law enforcement listening in, unless your outside a digital service area and your phone fails over to analog.
I've had moments in Brooklyn Heights, in NYC (which is notorious for bad cellular reception) where I'm on the phone and I can suddenly hear the conversation of a person a block away on my phone. When I look down, sure enough, it's on analog.
So be careful out there, kids.
Can you? I've done it ;) I worked on a particular government project which needed to be able to listen in to a wide range of frequencies, scanning for signals at a very high rate and then being able to tune into them. Consequently, we had to test it on all sorts of signals to make sure that it worked. Cell phone signals stick out like sore thumbs - nice, clean spikes. If I'm remembering correctly, at the time, we were only able to listen in to the analog signals, and you'd only get half of the conversation at a time (you're either listening to the phone or the tower, not both).
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.