Do they work? 4,537 arrest, with a sad 678 convictions just last year, a whopping 14.9 percent!
How much does it cost everytime a wiretap is issued? $52,200, it's $62,522 at the federal level.
What types of devices were targeted? Things like standard phones, cell phones, microphones (oral/eavesdrop), digital pagers, faxes, and of course, computers.
What gets me is that majority of the offenses these wiretaps were authorized for, were because of narcotics. 2,376 court authorized intercepts were granted , from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2009, 2,074 of those wiretaps were in the category of narcotics.
Courts authorized 2,376 criminal wiretap orders in 2009, with 96 percent targeting mobile phones in drug cases, according to the report. Federal officials requested 663 of the wiretaps, while 24 states accounted for 1,713 orders.
Not one request for a wiretap was turned down.
Each wiretap caught the communications of an average of 113 people, meaning that 268,488 people had text messages or phone calls monitored through the surveillance in 2009, a new record. Only 19 percent of the intercepted communications were incriminating, the same as in 2008. The report attributes some of the rise in the numbers to better reporting by the nation’s courts.
The 2009 taps led to the arrests of 4,537 people and 678 convictions. A wiretap authorized in 2008 in a drug case in Arizona netted 169 arrests and 116 convictions, while a drug-case wiretap from 2007 in Southern California led to 170 arrests and 17 convictions, prosecutors told the court this year.
Law enforcement officials have long warned that encryption technology allows criminals to hide their activities, but investigators encountered encrypted communications only one time during 2009’s wiretaps. The state investigators told the court that the encryption did not prevent them from getting the plain text of the messages.
The numbers in the report do not include wiretap orders in terrorism investigations, which go through a secret court in Washington, D.C. They also don’t account for the number of Americans whose communications were caught by the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, which Congress legalized in July 2008.
Read More at Wired, credit to the article goes to Ryan Singel.
America is coming closer and closer to becoming a nation filled with police states. Not only are they getting more aggressive in eavesdropping, there are cases of abuse springing up all over the country. Not only that, but don't we have to pay for each of these wiretaps, over 52,000 dollars on average?
The link to the Court Issued report is above, but here it is again for your convenience.
If you can download and read pdf files, here are the links within the report, but placed within the diary to back up certain assertions:
2009 WIRETAP REPORT
Types of Surveillance Used, Arrests, and Convictions for Intercepts Installed
Major Offenses for which Court-Authorized Intercepts Were Granted
Average Cost per Order
Arrests and Convictions Resulting from Intercepts Installed in