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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."
1. wire tap payphones 2. find out where my nigerian friend hid the money 3. ...
4. profit!
There is no sig
..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 must explain all that heavy breathing when I call those 1-900-XXX numbers.
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
You must understand... its just like a parent listening on their kid, to find out what trouble they are getting in... Only mom is a guy in a suit getting paid to listen to your phone sex.
This signature is part of a balanced post.
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.
I'd hardly call that a 'surge." More like a abrupt rise. For me, a surge implies that it is an unstoppable force. 19% is not too awe-inspiring. Its like saying, oh my god.. Slashdot trolls increase by 19%!!
What is your penile percentile?
"accounted for four of every four surveillance orders"
"or about ten out of every nine"
I was going to ignore it after the first one, but two in one article? C'mon AP, what sort of debacle is this?
Some 1,507 wiretaps -- or about ten out of every nine -- targeted portable devices, such as cell phones and pagers.
That's about 111%. Nice work with the numbers there.
"I planned within my means and got a fixed rate mortgage, so where's MY bailout?" -cafepress
Apparently judges have found that law enforcement is unbelievably perfect as they rubber-stamped approvals on every single request they received.
This is a little harsh, I think. First of all, the judge isn't saying "I believe that the wiretap target is guilty, therefore I authorize the wiretap." You don't have to be presumed guilty for a warrant to be necessary--there just has to be some indication that you may be guilty, the purpose of the warrant being to find out for sure.
Second of all, the system admits that it isn't perfect because human judgement has flaws, and attempts to balance individual rights against the need for effective law enforcement. The US Supreme Court has allowed an exception to search and seizure rules called the "good faith" exception. Basically, the doctrine states that if a law enforcement officer asks for a warrant or executes a search based on a warrant, and it's later shown that the warrant was invalid (shouldn't have been issued, information was bad, whatever), the SEARCH isn't necessarily invalid. As long as the officers involved made an honest mistake, the courts say that they're allowed to use the evidence to prosecute.
Why's this relevant? Because it shows that the point of the warrant-granting process is to check abusive behavior by law enforcement. It does its best to prevent honest, innocent people from being hassled, but it's not meant to try a case before the evidence is collected!
It seems likely, then, that in a properly-functioning system, nearly all warrant requests will be granted. Since officers know that someone is watching and second-guessing their warrant requests, they're not likely to try to slip bullshit pretenses in. The officers know the rules in advance, and probably won't bother trying to get a warrant unless they're pretty sure it's going to be successful.
It's the same reason why District Attorneys, nationwide, have a better-than 95% average conviction rate for cases brought to trial. If they think the case isn't going to stick, they won't try it.
If you want real privacy, use SpeakFreely with your own choice of encryption library.
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.
Our old story on VoIP Wiretapping
Interestingly in U.S., there are serious legal restrictions on the use of wiretaps by police agencies. The Supreme Court has consistently held that wiretaps qualify as searches under the Fourth Amendment.
Article on related topic of Open Internet Wiretapping: Carnivore
IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) policy on wiretapping which says: The IETF restates its strongly held belief, stated at greater length in [RFC 1984], that both commercial development of the Internet and adequate privacy for its users against illegal intrusion requires the wide availability of strong cryptographic technology.
Another issue: Is Dialing Into a Conference Call an Interception?
Real patriots have their phone lines wiretapped 24/7!
I find it hard to believe that these are just "rubberstamps" seeing aswithout any concrete evidence to justify the wiretap, any evidence they would gather from one or as a direct result from one would be not be admitted as evidence due to that whole 4th Amendment thingy.
Plus the article gives a plausible technological reason the increase given that it takes more stuff these days to nail people. Can't exactly bust someone plotting over blackberry, etc through pre-blackberry techniues.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
What was our population increase in 2004?
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
As soon as even low grade encryption becomes common the police are going to be screwed. The only reason normal phone lines arn't encrypted phone-to-phone is because it would be a hassle and would lower the quality (some sort of 56k modem in your phone, unless you can do some other trickery modulating with noise). As soon as you get to the realm of VoIP and phones have some processing power encryption starts to become something a system just 'might as well do'. Obviously man-in-the-middle would be a possibility but its trivial to just make a call and at the start read out a portion of your key and let the other person confirm it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
1754... that's all?
Of course wiretaps went up..
;-)
It was an election year, after all.
As fun as it is to reduce judges to idiots and cartoon villians, a whole bunch of them actually are competent. These things are granted because that's what's done. Judges don't assume cops are full of shit. But the system still works. It keeps the numbers down to 2,000 warrants that someone keeps track of instead of 200,000 searches whenever a cop feels like it that no one hears about.
Looks like those paper-pushing nancy-boys down at City Hall have finally realised we're fighting the good fight down here. This is the street, man, and it ain't pretty. I don't need no panty-waisted girly-man bleating about "civil rights" and "due process", that's exactly the kind of BS that gets the bad off on "a technicality".
/not ragging on cops, just how the "renegade cop who doesn't do things by the book but gets the job done" cliche is so popular in Hollywood while so despised in real life. :-)
"Technicality" my ass! I bagged that scumbag fair and square. If those assholes think I should have waited until I had evidence, they're living in fairyland.
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.
George Bush... is that you?
Did you really read it?
Huh?
Even the first paragraph?See the last sentence? That would be what we call a "word problem".
It goes something like this:
Every WMD in Iraq was destroyed, how many are left?
a) none of them
b) all of them
c) I'm invading anyway
d) all the above
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
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.
Maybe we need a law that says judges who approve 80%+ of the requests for warrents they recieve in a year, must have those cases reviewed to see if they all panned out.
If a judge approves a wire tap, and only 60% or less of those warrents lead to convictions (not just an arrest), then we have a problem. A Judge needs probable cause, and for me probable cause means the police already has strong evidence the person is going to break a crime.
There is one website, I will not mention it here, it is used by police officers (if you google, you will find). They talk about everything. Some forums are public forums (anyone who registers can read and post), and other forums are hidden, you must be part of a group to post. I saw that hidden area once and I was shocked to read some of the "tricks" police use to get warrents, to harrass people, and to stick together. For example, if a police officer thinks a judge will be resistant to approving a warrent, they will hit up some neighborhood scum to say "yeah... he is about to sell drugs from his house this weekend". And one other dirty trick. Say a police officer has a real and valid reason to believe you have a stolen car in your garage. This is a true story by the way from that forum. The police officer asked for advice with getting a warrent, because he wanted it all legal. One of the other experianced police officers told him to include drugs on the warrent, because if he does not, he can only search the garage and not desks or cabinets. One of the requirements of a warrent is you can only search for what you're looking for. So if he gets a warrent for a stolen car, and finds drugs hidden in the silverware cabinet in the house, they can't arrest the person for the drugs (unless the person is an idiot and lets them search, or gets a crappy public defender).
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
"...surged 19% in 2004 to 1,710."
/ us.html#Comm
1710 taps , how many phone lines in the US?
Telephones - main lines in use: 181,599,900
Telephones - mobile cellular: 158.722 million
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
340 million lines in the US.
Should have been from the uncle-sam-isn't-listening to many dept.
Here come the slide to Nazi Germany and whatnot posts.
"Apparently judges have found that law enforcement is unbelievably perfect as they rubber-stamped approvals on every single request they received."
Or maybe Judges demanded a crapload of extra evidence for the tiny number of wire taps approved.
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."
You're posting the text of a San Francisco Chronicle article, circulation +.5mil, so it isn't slashdotted? I am grateful to be able to RTFA without having to click the link, but I think they don't need to worry about slowing down from slashdotting.
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
Is America still the land of the free? Apparently not...
My little Linux and tech blog
"Apparently judges have found that law enforcement is unbelievably perfect as they rubber-stamped approvals on every single request they received."
There is no mention in the article about percentages of wiretap requests approved, so why make a baseless statement like this. Instead maybe the reason for the increase is because, as the article says:
"Drug dealers now are making use not just of traditional cell phones but a variety of devices, including Blackberries, pagers, and Nextels. So most likely these increased wiretap numbers simply reflect law enforcement's continuing efforts to keep pace with both the tactics and technology that is being used on the street," said Barr.
Vote for Pedro
Thing is, I'm not scared by this article. There are 290 million people living in the United States, and a 19% increase amounts to around 273 extra wiretaps across the country. Not scary. In fact, I'm surprised that the number is 10 times larger, given that it appears to be a small fraction of the number of crimes investigated every year that should have been wiretapped.
Furthermore, it may interest you to know that the legal standard for getting a wiretap is rather high (which is why there are so few of them).
See United States Telecom Assoc. v. FCC . So how, you ask, is it that there were no wiretap requests turned down if the standard is so high, and it's used relatively rarely?Simple. It's not like the police officers are going "Hey Judge, we need a wire-tap on this guy Frank 'cuz I think he's doing "crimes" -- and we need it yesterday!" What actually happens is the police officer goes to government lawyer. The government lawyer -- who does this all the time -- then tells the police officer 9 times out of 10 that they haven't met the standard. Even that 1 time out of 10, the government lawyer approaches the judge ex parte (i.e. not in a court proceeding) which allows the judge to indicate through subtle nods and grunts that the wiretap request is half-cooked, and to come back later. So you just don't get denied applications. By the way -- denied applications are the last thing the police want, because then -- dollars to donuts (hehe) when it comes time to the criminal trial, the wiretap evidence will be considered inadmissible even if the police eventually did get their wiretap.
What Devlin Barrett, the reporter who wrote the article, should have mentioned, is how many wiretap requests were officially turned down over the last few years. But the reporter omitted this information, most likely because very few requests have been officially denied within the last decade. So the alarmist language used in the article makes it, IMHO, FUD.
Regards,
Moiche
please mod as appropriate.
stupid trolls. probably thinks he's a clever subversive now.
This was informative? How about funny? Even funnier were those who questioned the math.
RTFA not the parent.
I have a friend who works for a large US company (no names, but it sounds a bit like "moo-sent") which makes the cell tower equipment used by several of the large american carriers, especially Verizon with their new high-speed data service. The last time I visited his office, he showed me the CALEA (Communication Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994) box from their in-house system mock-up (used for training Verizon's techs.)
In a normal market area, all of a carrier's towers are linked back to a single facility for the entire market, and that facility contains the links to the wireline carriers. Inside this data center, the sound channels of all of the calls on all of the towers are sorted out and routed to the appropriate wireline ports. The equipment which does this knows how to do a "wiretap"- as a call starts, if either the caller's number or the number being called are listed in a certain database, the call is set up with a copy of the audio being routed to what is essentially a WAV file. When the call is done, that WAV file is immediately emailed to whatever law enforcement person is interested.
IN THEORY, the law enforcement types are supposed to show a court order before being able to add numbers to the database. IN REALITY, the carrier (at least Verizon) provides an SSL-secured web interface where law enforcement can just go and enter the number and an email address. The carrier does not perform any verification of whether or not there is a valid court order, they stay as close to hands-off as they can.