Wiretaps Keep on Rising
The number of court-authorized wiretaps for criminal investigations
rose again in 1999, continuing a 20-year trend of increased
electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens. According to a new report by the
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, court-authorized
surveillance orders were up two percent from 1998, to 1,350 in 1999.
During the Clinton Administration, federal wiretapping has increased by 33
percent.
Since 1980, the total number of wiretaps has increased by 230 percent.
In 1999 not a single request for a wiretap was refused by any judge
in the United States.
Wiretaps are seldom used to investigate crimes of violence. The War on
Drugs has been driving the massive increase in wiretapping in the past two
decades, and 1999 was no exception. More than 72 percent of requested
wiretaps were for drug cases, while ten percent were for "racketeering" and
only 4.5 percent for homicide and assault.
The invasive nature of wiretaps, and the civil liberties threat they pose
to the privacy of non-criminal citizens, is illustrated by the fact that
the vast majority of people whose conversations were intercepted by
wiretaps in 1999 were innocent of any charge.
In 1999, wiretaps recorded over 63,000 days of conversations of nearly
250,000 people. Yet according to prosecutors, only 20 percent of the
calls that they intercepted were actually "relevant" to a criminal
investigation.
Critics of wiretapping argue that if warrants were issued that allowed
police to search five houses to get information relevant to one criminal
offense, the public would be outraged. Yet similar statistics are the norm
in wiretaps.
(Source: EPIC Alert, newsletter of the Electronic Privacy Information
Center (EPIC), May 3, 2000)
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