FBI Wants to Wiretap One of Every 100 Phones in Urban Areas

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:03 AM 11/3/95, clark.matthews at paranet.org wrote:
>Thanks for this item!  Two little excerpts jump out at me.  They follow:
>> Last year, federal and state courts authorized 1,154 wiretaps, of which 48 
>> percent ....
>> "People are starting to say that seems awfully high," Dempsey said,
noting that
>> the overall level of such surveillance activity is now a total of 20,000 
>> to 25,000 intercepts nationwide over an entire year.

>So what is it?  1,154 wiretaps?  Or 20,000?

Perhaps that's 1154 wiretap victims, with an average of 20 intercepts each?

In a separate article, Clark posted estimates that ranged from
500K - 1.5M people could be wiretapped, depending on how many people
are in the 1%/.5%/.25% zones.  It's worse than that - if they're tapping
the average victim for (say) 3 months, that's 4 times as many victims....
And just how many cops do they plan to hire to watch all these phones?
Computers can help some, especially for data, but who's going to read it all,
even after the fancy pattern recognition systems pick out the possible good
stuff.

>FBI Director Louis Freeh testified under oath to 1,157.  The FBI was asked
>for the data to support those numbers.  The FBI refused to release them 
>until the year 2002.  [....]
>One last thing.
>What's so special about the year 2002?  

Statute of limitations?  :-)
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# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts at ix.netcom.com
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