With a Single Wiretap Order, US Authorities Listened In on 3.3 Million Phone Calls (zdnet.com)

US authorities intercepted and recorded millions of phone calls last year under a single wiretap order, authorized as part of a narcotics investigation, ZDNet's Zack Whittaker reports. From the article: The wiretap order authorized an unknown government agency to carry out real-time intercepts of 3.29 million cell phone conversations over a two-month period at some point during 2016, after the order was applied for in late 2015. The order was signed to help authorities track 26 individuals suspected of involvement with illegal drug and narcotic-related activities in Pennsylvania. The wiretap cost the authorities $335,000 to conduct and led to a dozen arrests. But the authorities noted that the surveillance effort led to no incriminating intercepts, and none of the handful of those arrested have been brought to trial or convicted.

Comments

So much winning!

[Anonymous Coward]

Great success! Flawless victory! The war on drugs is now over!

The drugs won.

Re:So much winning!

[Anonymous Coward]

It was never about the drugs. It is about control of people who think differently.

Re: So much winning!

[OrangeTide]

Last year... 2016... how many of those 3 million wire tapped were Republican?

Exactly, let's go back to 2016 where we were going after the real criminals.

Re:So much winning!

[BronsCon]

Control of Apple users?

Re: So much winning!

[AutodidactLabrat]

Last year... 2016... how many of those 3 million wire tapped were Republican?

Exactly, let's go back to 2016 where we were going after the real criminals.

Thanks! Reality intrudes again!

Re:So much winning!

[Anonymous Coward]

Megol posted:
>Like those that think a society should protect the people against dangers? Those that realize that a drug addict have no control? Those that knows the costs for an individual, a family and the society drug abuse have?

And yet, those very things have never been contained through the use of force via legal apparatus. Your stance is the very argument of a prohibitionist era proponent, whose actions did nothing to help families with addiction problems or promote treatment over persecution. In fact, it did a great deal to feed the power and growth of organized criminal elements, not to mention sow division and violence among the populace. Prohibition increases demand. It is advocated only by the ignorant, and profiteers who wish to capitalize on the misery it produces. It's no more effective against addiction, than imprisonment, torture, and execution is against the spread of disease!

Re:So much winning!

[doccus]

Control of Apple users?

Precisely! Drink Thifferently... Sorry, couldn't find a matching word for druggin' differently.. but drinkin' is a droog too, eh?

none... have been brought to trial or convicted.

[fustakrakich]

But they rot in prison, right? I feel so safe!

Re:Question

[Tulsa_Time]

Did you discuss it on the phone with anyone ?

Re:none... have been brought to trial or convicted

[gweihir]

Yes, a great victory for... basically nobody.

Re: none... have been brought to trial or convicte

[dougdonovan]

can you hear me now ?

1 = 3.3 Million?

[Zurkeyon3733]

Yeah this sounds like US LEO-Logic... Way to go Common core! :-D

Re:Only ten cents per wiretap?

[helsinki92]

Absolutely. This is the perfect argument for the NSA. Judge, by installing more taps we are costing the American tax payer less money through economy of scale. Its a win-win for the American people.

Re:Control-F Trump

[93 Escort Wagon]

Nah... the issue is you're on a Mac - so you needed to hit Command-F.

Wrong Administration

[Kunedog]

It was "last year" and that's not the POTUS we'd wage a never-ending demonization campaign against.

Re:Wrong Administration

[Mashiki]

Keep in mind that's also the POTUS that if you dared speak out against, the first response from the progressives was that: "you're a racist." But hey, they can keep digging that hole, sure going to be interesting with Rice testifying now, especially after all that backtracking and that it appears that the previous administration illegally unmasked people for political reasons(or that her story has changed and that she actually did unmask names illegally). And that those records were sent to the Obama library(which hasn't been built yet) and will take an act of congress to actually uncover, unless after that testimony that they subpoena them which is likely going to be the case.

inb4 someone claims legal insurrection is a partisan site, and not operated by one of the top law blogs run by a clinical law processor at Cornell.

Re:Wrong Administration

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem people are having with the current POTUS is that he is a colossal fucking retard who claims people like Alex Jones are respectable members of the media.

I certainly don't care if you're racist. Everybody's racist. I just care if you're an idiot. And the orange clown and his salad tossers are some of the biggest idiots we have seen in a long time, a weird mixture of terrified and ignorant old people, and unemployed and uneducated young people.

Re:Wrong Administration

[Anonymous Coward]

So a guy gets into a political office, and somehow this just adds jobs immediately to the economy? Interesting, I'd like to see how this economic model is designed.

Dumbest people on the planet are the brainwashed right, followed closely by the brainwashed left, but still in the lead.

Re: Wrong Administration

[Mashiki]

In the world of the Trump supporter, how import might you gauge, say, causality? Does it exist?

Well let's go with causality. When unemployment was trending up on the basis that Clinton was going to win, and suddenly revered when Trump won? That's a pretty good correlation isn't it.

With a Single Wiretap Order, US Authorities....

[DivineKnight]

"And they learned nothing."

skeptical of the maths

[rmdingler]

3,300,000/26 suspects = 126,923 calls per suspect in two months?

9065 calls per suspect per day=377 per day, or one call every 15.738 minutes if none of them sleep.

Re:skeptical of the maths

[rtb61]

Basically a fishing expedition authorised by secret courts. So 26 suspects and everyone they called and all the people that those people called and then all the people that those people called and on and on it went. Blatant criminal fishing expedition, criminal as it exceeds the laws governing search warrants by a huge margin. Planned from the start and approved by an extremely corrupt judge.

Re:skeptical of the maths

[mentil]

The 26 people were being tracked; reading between the lines, I'd say that Stingrays were used to try and find the location of these 26 suspects, and 3.3 million calls were routed through the Stingrays for the duration of their usage. Those calls didn't necessarily have their content 'listened in on.'

Re:skeptical of the maths

[AHuxley]

Think of it in terms of 3 or 4 hops of connections from one really well presented court request. Friends of friends of friends of the internet account across the street.
That maths gets big even with a few family, kin and average number of work, educational, friends been connected in the first 2 hops. 3rd and 4th hop gets bigger still as they all get collected on as a new hop.
4 hops of connections to any US/international communications over decades and generations gets a lot of people all around the USA.

Re:skeptical of the maths

[SuricouRaven]

Or just an extremely lax judge. Investigators know how to play the system - if they want to push the limits of a warrant, they will know which judge is most likely to say yes.

Re:skeptical of the maths

[Hank the Lion]

3 or 4 hops.
Suspect calls pizza delivery service (1 hop)
Now everyone who has called that pizza delivery service is under surveillance _as only the second hop_.
In this way, 3.3 million people are easily reached from 4 hops from people under surveillance.
I doubt that the ones signing the legislation allowing 4 hops were aware of this.
If they were, all the worse.

Re:skeptical of the maths

[AHuxley]

Some good charts existed in the press about the 3 hop size of investigations.
With 3 'Hops,' NSA Gets Millions Of Phone Records (July 31, 2013)
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

You say this as though....

[kelanos]

You say this as though one branch of the government or other isn't tapping every phone call at all times.

I think the true headline is they were forced to admit they USED 3.3 million of the records they already had.

Re:You say this as though....

[drinkypoo]

You say this as though one branch of the government or other isn't tapping every phone call at all times.

Yes, how quickly they forget.

Call Centre?

[CanadianMacFan]

Did they get a wiretap order for a call centre that one of the suspects worked at or something?

Re:Only ten cents per wiretap?

[AHuxley]

Everything that can be sold or can connect to the the US telco network is wiretap friendly. Voice, ip, number call, text, files, logs, images, remote turn mic on, remote turn camera on, gps.

Who didn't see this?

[GodfatherofSoul]

When I saw my boss's phone years ago had the ability to convert his phone messages into text, I knew we were officially living out 1984. We knew 10 years ago the phone companies were piping all their communications into a secret government room. You think they were just doing it to fight "turrists"?

What the western world needs...

[Kokuyo]

...and I don't just mean the US, is to rain the judicial equivalent of an Undertaker choke-slam upon government people who would abuse the law in such a fashion.

Frankly, I think there should be a point in every constitution that someone abusing that which he is tasked to protect faces twice the penalty of someone who wasn't.

Damn

[nospam007]

McNulty, what the fuck did you do?

Re:Hmm

[OrangeTide]

Pretty sure that this would fall under the unreasonable search clause of the U.S. Constitution

"What's a Constitution?" asks your local district attorney.

sgt_doom

[sgt_doom]

The feebs can do ALL OF THIS, yet cannot arrest a single bankster responsible for the economic meltdown and continuing money laundering or Wells Fargo-like crimes? Oh, I forgot, Eric Holder . . . .(And Robert Swan Mueller III, and James Comey et al. Remember that dude, Swan, who was head of the FRBSF back in 1963 when millions of dollars of securities went missing?)

Re:The real issue.

[Megol]

Nobody bitches about the web developers as porn site operators aren't a group discriminated against. That's what that case was about - discrimination. If the bakery didn't bake wedding cakes for anybody there wouldn't be a problem, if they didn't bake it for a nazi wedding it wouldn't be a problem, if they didn't bake it because they didn't like the cut of their (the customers) jib it wouldn't be a problem. They refused to do it because the people ordering it were homosexuals. There are laws against discriminating for racial, sexual (and a lot of other) reasons so refusing due to that is against the law.

NB that nowhere in the NT (and AFAIK not in the OT either) are there commandments to refuse homosexuals or other "sinners" service. Actually that idea goes directly against what Jesus preached!

Personally I'd be okay with refusing service to homosexuals if they weren't the only "sinners" refused. I'd expect each potential customer to fill in a huge questionnaire with such questions like "have you ever touched a menstruating woman" and "have you ever said hard words against your parents".

Re:And we're supposed to believe...

[BronsCon]

I'm not saying the post you're replying to is right, but... You mean... in 2016... when this happened?

Efficiency (or "I for one"...)

[eric_harris_76]

All that snooping using just one search warrant? That's efficiency.

I for one welcome our snoopy police state overlords.