Wiretap Requests From Federal and State Authorities Fell 14% In 2011

coondoggie writes "Federal and state court orders approving the interception of wire, oral or electronic communications dropped 14% in 2011, compared to the number reported in 2010. According to a report issued by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts a total of 2,732 wiretap applications were authorized in 2011 by federal and state courts, with 792 applications by federal authorities and 1,940 applications by 25 states that provide reports. The reduction in wiretaps resulted primarily from a drop in applications for intercepts in narcotics offenses, the report noted."

Comments

This doesn't mean the amount of wiretaps have drop

[Anonymous Coward]

Only that the ones done legally have dropped. I'm sure the total amount of wiretapping has gone up.

CarrierIQ and the like have made taps obsolete.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why muck around with asking for permission when the phone companies are more than happy to preinstall malware for you and be very cooperative as long as you don't mess with their business?

Thank you, Internet

[Whatsmynickname]

The cynical side in me says: Thanks to the Internet, everyone (not just law enforcement) now has wiretap capabilities far far beyond what they could do just 10-20 years ago. ANYONE can now track anything beyond their wildest dreams. Wiretaps are going the way of brick-and-mortar store, print shops, and rotary dial telephones.

Except you can't do that

[daveschroeder]

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 clearly specifies that an properly adjudicated, individualized warrant from a court is required to collect, process, analyze, store, or disseminate the content of the communications of a US Person. While it seems to be common belief that you can just "call someone a terrorist and tap their phones," this is in fact false.

If you think the government will just ignore the law and do whatever it wants anyway, then any discussion of the law is moot.

Re:Except you can't do that

[Bob9113]

If you think the government will just ignore the law and do whatever it wants anyway, then any discussion of the law is moot.

Actually, that is when it is most important to discuss the law; to document the non-compliance as a part of the cultural record and to bring it to raise it as an issue to those in government who are supposed to act as the correcting force.

It is the natural course of governments to seek to do what they think is in the best interests of the citizenry. It is also the nature of the people who embody government to realize that they could do more good for the people if they were uninhibited by law. Finally, it is the nature of government on our scale to have some secrets in order to operate effectively.

Given that humans are fallible and subject to distorted perception, it is the nature of such a system for abuses to occur. Each time such an abuse occurs, it either leads to correction or reinforcement of the behavior. Correction if they are punished, reinforcement if they are not.

In the United States, The People are the ultimate sovereigns. We are the ones who have to ensure that the government acts in the interest of the nation. We do that by correcting the government when its internal mechanisms fail to do the job. When the government ignores the law and its internal mechanisms fail to correct it, it is our most important patriotic duty to discuss it, to vote them out if they do not listen, to formally demand redress if we elect those who promise correction and they fail to do so, and to remove them by force if they deny the authority of petition for redress. Each subsequent step is significantly more costly than the one before. The least costly one is discussion.

Discussing lawlessness in government is not frivolous. On the contrary, discussion is the first and least costly means to avoiding the bloody mess of revolution. Denial of such lawlessness or inhibiting the discussion thereof is a path to escalation.

So...

[betterunixthanunix]

Is this just because criminals are now using Internet services, and the service operators are just cooperating with law enforcement and providing a loophole in the wiretap process?

So?

[Thaelon]

Did they do it less, or stop asking for permission?

Re:[Citation needed]

[poetmatt]

really? How much proof do you need?

http://epic.org/privacy/nsl/#stats

NSL's are almost never even constitutional, so "not legal" wiretaps. Yet they're on an order of magnitude higher. 2700 wiretaps vs 8500 before the patriot act and 140k after the patriot act?

They shifted from legal methods (harder to obtain) to sanctioned but clearly illegal methods (simple to obtain, no judicial oversight, no perjury or accountability).

Before the NSA data center opens?!

[guttentag]

Wow! And the new NSA data center that's-so-big-the-town-they're-building-it-in-had-to-expand-its-boundaries in Utah isn't even online yet! Just imagine how infrequently they'll need to bother the courts after it opens next year. Eventually judges may be able to go back to their original mission of hearing cases, unmolested by the petty need to approve wiretaps.

Re:[Citation needed]

[Anonymous Coward]

NSL's are requests for information, not wiretaps.

Logical conclusion

[Livius]

And when they've finished tapping everyone, the requests for new taps will drop to nearly zero!

"Wiretap requests"

[doston]

That hardly means wiretaps in general. For all I know, they're just emboldened to the point of not bothering with red tape. Where I worked (ex telecom engineer), the feds weren't obliged to present any special documents. The services I managed had a simple URL and a simple login/password where the government could login and look at customer data at any time.