[TSCM-L] Technology boosts use of wiretaps

[Dave Emery]

Original URL: http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/oct04/263737.asp 


Technology boosts use of wiretaps
By DERRICK NUNNALLY
dnunnally at journalsentinel.com
Posted: Oct. 2, 2004
Madison - In an unassuming office building on a leafy street near Dane County Regional Airport, a couple rooms of computer equipment are quietly changing the nature of law enforcement in Wisconsin.

When they're clicking into action, most people won't even know they're there. And that's the point. They are wiretap machines, meant to allow police to listen in on the private phone conversations of suspected criminals.

For years, police here rarely resorted to wiretaps, which require a court order, and that was mostly limited to cases involving severe violence or the threat of it.

On average, it happened less than twice a year.

Now it happens more than once a month, due in large part to new computer technology that has streamlined much of what officials describe as a cumbersome, painstaking process. It included tracking down the phone company's switching equipment, setting up huge recorders and manually starting them with each call, and amassing half a room's worth of tapes, then methodically indexing them all.

"You'd have to have three reel-to-reel recorders for every line you'd want to wiretap," said Edward Wall, a special agent for covert surveillance in the state Department of Justice.

Wall held up a disk drive from the new system he said could hold 900 hours of recorded conversations, indexed at least half a dozen different ways. It was a little bigger than two CD cases held together, and, he said, held the power to make Wisconsin investigators much more willing to ask for wiretaps to investigate crime.

"When they find these are not as hard as they used to be, that mind-set is changing," Wall said.

Since the state acquired the new wiretap setup from the Office of National Drug Control Policy in summer 2003, the system has been used in the completed taps of 13 separate phone numbers, Wall said. That's a marked increase from recent years. Federal records indicate that from 1999-2002, while the nation averaged 1,200 wiretaps yearly, Wisconsin police had only run five.

While the system has not been discussed much outside of police circles, law enforcement agencies already have used it in at least a couple of high-profile operations, including the kidnapping of Heddy Braun in Walworth County in 2003 and a Milwaukee investigation this spring that led to the arrests of more than 30 people charged with being part of a cocaine-selling ring.

The role of the new wiretap machines has been kept hush-hush in part because of the state law restricting their use.

Because phone surveillance intrudes so seriously on someone's right to privacy, information gleaned from wiretaps only becomes public well into the court process, which can take months. Milwaukee police announced the dozens of arrests in the big drug case in a May news release, but much of the information about them remains under wraps and only has a chance of becoming public this month, long after the defendants have been formally charged and begun working their way through the judicial system.

Another reason for the new system's low profile until now was that police believed no good could come of advertising their new capability, Wall said.

Both the Milwaukee Police Department and the Milwaukee County sheriff's office, through spokespeople, declined to discuss the new technology.

Wall agreed to talk about it after the Department of Justice was asked specifically about its acquisition. He said he wanted to de-mystify a subject that, while not officially a secret, has inspired fears among some that the government, enabled by the USA Patriot Act of 2001, is tapping phones excessively.

"Those of us who do wiretaps just sit there and roll our eyes," Wall said of those concerns. "God, if you only knew what we had to go through for a wiretap. It's the most cumbersome thing in the world."

Police must get a judge's authorization for each phone number they want to monitor. To get that, investigators must put together a detailed affidavit explaining the kind of conversation they expect to hear, and why such evidence can't be obtained some other way.

Few of those affidavits have become public. Wall and other officials described them as onerous, but justly so. Now that the taps themselves are simpler to run and yield better data, authorities are exploring a wider range of reasons to ask for them.

"There was a time that I was much more reluctant to use wiretaps," said Milwaukee District Attorney E. Michael McCann, "but the violence attendant to various activities has persuaded me to the contrary."

Now cases such as the alleged drug ring - in which no violence or threat is evident in the small part of the allegations that have been made public - are coming into courts.

More are likely, and in more disparate parts of the state, as word of the new system's capabilities filters out, Wall said. Where formerly police in any part of the state had to seek out switching equipment - mostly in Madison or Milwaukee - to set up a wiretap, the new computer system can be run from Madison on "a phone from anywhere in the world" and piped out to any part of the state.

"When they give it to us, they're essentially giving it to 72 county sheriffs and 700 police departments," Wall said. "When you call me and you're from the Podunk Police Department, we're there."

Ray Dall'Osto, a Milwaukee defense attorney and former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said he is interested in examining the kinds of new wiretap cases and whether Wisconsin authorities use a wider range of justifications for listening in on citizens' conversations.

The right to privacy in certain situations, he said, is very fragile, like an egg.

"Once it's gone, it's very hard, if not impossible, to put back together," Dall'Osto said.

He also expects the uptick in wiretap usage to continue.

"They've got this stuff, and they've got to use it," Dall'Osto said.


-- 
   Dave Emery N1PRE,  die at dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493