US Government Approved 100% Of Wiretap Applications In
2015
A 10-year study shows the U.S. wiretaps increasingly
often and effectively
By Kevin Collier Jul 05, 2016 at 11:44 AM ET
A ten-year study of how state and federal law enforcement
wiretaps suspects shows that the government is extremely efficient at the
practice, and is only getting better.
The new report, conducted by the Federal Judiciary,
looked at the prevalence of the FBI and state and local police petitioning for
a warrant to surveil someone. Methods range from tracking their computer
activity to bugging a home telephone or a room, though it overwhelmingly—96
percent of the time 2015—meant tracking or listening to their cell phone calls.
It has become a common enough practice that in a ten-year span, a wiretap
request has been denied only eight times, and never more than twice in a year.
According to the report, “No wiretap applications were reported as denied in
2015.”
It's pretty rare for the U.S. courts to deny a request
for a wiretap
And while the number of wiretaps that courts approve has
steadily risen over the past decade, to the point where they’ve more than
doubled from 1,774 in 2005 to 4,148 in 2015, wiretapping has become a more
cost-effective process.
The average cost per intercept is steadily coming down
Of note is that despite FBI director James Comey’s
repeated insistence of an endemic of terrorists and other criminals “going
dark”—using chat programs that use end-to-end encryption, like iMessage or
WhatsApp, making it impossible to easily understand a wiretapped message—only
six federal wiretaps were reported encrypted in 2015, and two of those were
successfully decrypted. It’s rare at the state level, too: 22 instances of
intercepted information being encrypted were reported in 2014, but only seven
in 2015.
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