Number of Federal Wiretaps Rose 71 Percent In 2012 84
cold fjord writes "Looks like last year was pretty busy. I wonder how many were leaks and media? From the Washington Post: 'The number of wiretaps secured in federal criminal investigations jumped 71 percent in 2012 over the previous year, according to newly released figures. Federal courts authorized 1,354 interception orders for wire, oral and electronic communications, up from 792 the previous year, ... There was a 5 percent increase in state and local use of wiretaps in the same period. ... There is no explanation of why the federal figures increased so much, and it is generally out of line with the number of wiretaps between 1997 and 2009, which averaged about 550 annually. There was also a large number of wiretaps in 2010, when 1,207 were secured. A single wiretap can sweep up thousands of communications. One 30-day local wiretap in California, for instance, generated 185,268 cellular telephone interceptions, of which 12 percent were incriminating, according to the report. The vast majority of the wiretaps in both federal and state cases were obtained as part of drug investigations, and they overwhelmingly were directed at cellphones ... Only 14 court orders were for personal residences. Most jurisdictions limit the period of surveillance to 30 days, but extensions can be obtained.'"
Crime is down trending (Score:5, Interesting)
Law enforcement has traditionally gone after low hanging fruit. They don't like pissing off the really nasty ones who would kill them, their families and their cat Fluffy. They're fishing for justification to continue to exist. That's what all the terrorist crap is about and why they'll continue to expand domestic crimes as terrorism.
Soon it will be illegal to report on crop failures, droughts, civic unrest, midnight arrests etc. etc. as that will be facilitating terrorism.
Re:Seems a bit low... (Score:1, Interesting)
If you think understanding a Yankee is hard, try being a Yankee and understanding a southerner. I'm from Alabama currently living in the boondocks in Michigan. You would think I have two heads speaking French with how hard it is for these folks to understand me. Always having to repeat myself. "Oil" "flight" "high" and other words with that "i" sound are the worst for them. I have had people guess I'm from Australia, England, etc. lol wtf?
Re: Seems a bit low... (Score:4, Interesting)
The NSA never needed wiretaps, they were SPIES. The problem is that the Patriot Act opened the gates to regular (police and FBI) law enforcement having access to shared toys the NSA and CIA used to use, but more importantly the TRAINING regime shifted to using spying and subterfuge rather than direct investigation and face time with citizens. The biggest shift is that Peace Officers went from being people on the street we knew, to lions that pick off the weak critters in the night.
Back on topic, the NSA is something regular folks never really will ever deal with. The NSA and CIA play hunches and probabilities all the time...basing lots of actions on race, sex, income, religion, Slashdot posts, etc... Knowing that all that data just adds dice to the "probability your crazy pool" none of it STOPS YOU from being the bad guy who rolls all '1' to give the worst outcome today... But odds are you aren't that guy out of 300 million. REGULAR POLICE have no business first having access to that info because its ILLEGAL, and second have no training or the psych profile to handle knowing such things about people. Lots of people have traits of serial killers, even multiple traits... But serial killers are still a small fraction of actual people with bad traits. Regular people as police aren't trained and conditioned mentally to understand that. So all this data collection is worse than meaningless because they really are not capable of processing it properly.