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April 29, 2005 6:52 PM

"The number of secret court-authorized wiretaps across the country surged by 19 percent last year, according to court records which also showed that not a single application was denied."
posted by knave (20 comments total)

Oh, Great!!

Now they're on to BOTH of us!!
posted by Balisong at 7:24 PM on April 29, 2005

Kinda makes the whole judicial oversight we rabbled about to keep, kinda unnecessary, if every single one goes unchallenged.
posted by Balisong at 7:30 PM on April 29, 2005

My favoritest part:

Officials said most of the applications, some 1,308, were for drug investigations, while racketeering or gambling wiretaps accounted for a combined 128 wiretaps around the country.

Homicides and assaults produced 48 wiretap orders.
posted by rxrfrx at 7:51 PM on April 29, 2005

I'm surprised that they even bother to apply for a wiretap. I remember Schwarzenegger saying that they do hundreds of illegal wiretaps a day so the paperwork doesn't really matter.
posted by Arch Stanton at 8:03 PM on April 29, 2005

"By the end of the year, the surveillance had generated 4,506 arrests and 634 convictions based on wiretap evidence."

Ok, it's disconcerting that not a single one was challenged. Given the law of averages, some of these must have had questionable evidence to back up the need but that's not to say many of them were, in fact, reasonable. I think the numbers here back that up.

Also, the article clarifies that "The numbers, released Thursday, do not include court orders for terror-related investigations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which reached a record 1,754 warrants last year, according to the Justice Department." so I don't know how much that goes to the argument that this is big brother gone mad.

As far as limited wiretaps for homicides and assaults, well, duh; how many people are talking on their phones about the dude they're gonna jack or somebody their going to kill? Typically spontaneous stuff.

just sayin'.
posted by j.p. Hung at 8:06 PM on April 29, 2005

As far as limited wiretaps for homicides and assaults, well, duh; how many people are talking on their phones about the dude they're gonna jack or somebody their going to kill? Typically spontaneous stuff.


Uh... how often do wiretaps get set up before any crime takes place? Presumably most of these were set up to listen to chatter about a crime that happened, and that law enforcement was trying to solve.
posted by rxrfrx at 8:16 PM on April 29, 2005

Or they could be embracing the whole concept of Pre-Emptive Surveillance. Have you noticed those cameras at every intersection? Just to catch red light runners after the fact, my ass.
posted by Balisong at 8:24 PM on April 29, 2005

Ok, it's disconcerting that not a single one was challenged. Given the law of averages, some of these must have had questionable evidence to back up the need but that's not to say many of them were, in fact, reasonable. I think the numbers here back that up

Without the oversight at the beginning, the chance that many of those are false convictions is much higher. In any case this borders on the authoritarian pacifier: "if you haven't got anything to hide then you have nothing to fear from [insert unreasonable unsupervised surveillance or search method]
posted by Rumple at 8:25 PM on April 29, 2005

Note that the statistics do not show that no wiretap ever went unchallenged. Indeed, the wiretap could not have been challenged at the application stage, because that's an ex parte proceeding. The wiretap could only be challenged, in the strict sense, by the defendant after being charged with a crime. These statistics do not reflect the number of wiretaps successfully challenged during prosecution. For more detail, you can refer to the Wiretap Report for 2004 from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:49 PM on April 29, 2005

Also note that most of these wiretaps actually target mobile devices like cellular phones and pagers. I'd be willing to bet that the number of mobile devices has increased at a rate similar to or faster than the number of wiretaps. There are more wiretaps now in large part because there are more wires to tap, so to speak. That's not to say that judges shouldn't scrutinize applications for taps closely, but it's a relatively low bar to obtain a warrant for a wiretap.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:54 PM on April 29, 2005

"Uh... how often do wiretaps get set up before any crime takes place?"

Uh...all the time. Convictions for conspiracy to commit are quite common. You presume too much.

"Without the oversight at the beginning, the chance that many of those are false convictions is much higher."

You assume to know the specifics of the warrants in question; not to mention you assume the issuing judge had was so daft as to have no oversight of his/her own.

Look, I'm not a fan of intrusive gov't more than anyone else here but I choose to side on behalf of a law enforcement community that has a genuine interest in getting the bad guy. I'll take the odds that the few bad "good guys" are way-outnumbered by the many "bad guys". Because that's all you're talking about here...odds.
posted by j.p. Hung at 8:57 PM on April 29, 2005

Wiretaps are particularly useful for continuing criminal enterprises. The drug trade is the most common continuing criminal enterprise. I imagine gambling would be second. Murder would not be too high up on the list.

Vice and Narcotics agencies generally know exactly who is selling what. They get a wiretap so (among other reasons) so that they can know the best time to pop someone who is in possession of a large amount of narcotics. Ideally, this might even occur at the sale itself. The wiretaps are a good way to figure out where and when the sales are taking place.
posted by flarbuse at 9:27 PM on April 29, 2005

You assume to know the specifics of the warrants in question; not to mention you assume the issuing judge had was so daft as to have no oversight of his/her own.

Hence "the chance ........ is much higher." I don't assume anything, except that being complacent as the state cranks up its surveillance technology is not a good thing. The apparent fact that there were no rejected applications does, indeed, suggest the judges, if not daft, were themselves complacent. and not exercising much oversight.

monju-bosatsu (spellcheck suggests "motor-boats"!) - if thats true why even have to apply for the wiretap authorization? If it is a rubber stamp at the beginning, this authorizes intrusive fishing trips and invasion of privacy. Obviously the wire-tappee can't challenge it before their wire is tapped, but if you are right then the procedure is a sham.

Whats weird about the source you cite are the jurisdictional anomalies .... about equal numbers of states where wiretaps are authorized did not use them vs. those that did -- or used them sparingly. Ohio - one wiretap, New Jersey - 144
posted by Rumple at 9:27 PM on April 29, 2005

What's really scary:

1,710 - regular wiretaps where a prosecutor (or cop) goes in front of a judge and lays out their probable cause, the valid reasons they have for investigating the guy and why the wiretap will be effective.
vs.
1,754 - FISA wiretaps, where a fed tells a judge that they want to tap the phone for national security reasons, no showing of probable cause required.

Is the domestic war on terror so large that it is now bigger than an all other crime combined? I think what this really shows us is the scope of the "war on terror." Feds are using their expanded enforcement powers (meant to be there just to combat terrorism) to go after normal criminals and other undesirables. I think this is a bigger issue currently than judges rubber stamping warrants, which has happened since they invented rubber stamps.
posted by slm303 at 5:35 AM on April 30, 2005

Less than 3500 wiretaps total? That's all?

Yawn! I can't see the mountain for the molehill.

Next?
posted by mischief at 6:46 AM on April 30, 2005

I, for one, am glad that mischief is happy about the state of things. Your capitulation to apathy and complacence is quite welcome, comrade patriot.
posted by Busithoth at 6:54 AM on April 30, 2005

Anyone care to point to:

* A federal case where the defense hinged on the abuse of wiretaps?

* A non-trivial prosecution of international terrorists?

* Any suggestion that the feddies are either a) running amok or b) earning their pay (given all the chest-pounding about this here Global War on Terror)?

The reason I'm asking is that I can't. The FBI seems to be a near-complete waste of resources. But that's just me.

There is always the claim that there are enormous numbers of super-duper success stories, but we can't tell you because it's a secret. However, since that's never been true in the past, there isn't much reason to believe it's true now and even less reason to believe it might be true in the future.
posted by warbaby at 7:24 AM on April 30, 2005

So, Bustooth, what do you have to hide? We have ways of making you talk. Then again, with your mouth all we have to do is tape everything you say and just wait until you hang yourself. heheh

I mean, c'mon, you guys are making an issue out of 3500 wiretaps in a nation of 280 million people? 1 wiretap per 80000?

No wonder no one gives you any credence.
posted by mischief at 7:34 AM on April 30, 2005

warbaby wrote, "Anyone care to point to ... a federal case where the defense hinged on the abuse of wiretaps?"

See, e.g., United State v. Judd, 42 Fed.Appx. 140, Slip Copy, 2002 WL 1316496 (10th Cir. June 18, 2002), available here. In that case, four defendants, charged and convicted with various offenses related to a methamphetamine conspiracy, appealed their convictions based in part on a challenge to the validity of the wiretap evidence. In the course of rejecting their appeal, the court provides a summary of the standard required for the issuance of a wiretap.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:21 AM on April 30, 2005

Privacy is the 678,932,242nd casualty of the war on consensual crime.
posted by Kwantsar at 8:25 AM on April 30, 2005