>Aaron--
>
>US West can not tap your phone anytime they want without a court order.
>If you have proof of that, you can have all of the evidence obtained in
>this manner thrown out, and you can counter-sue for violating your civil
>rights.
They did. It's in the search warrant (which Luke Welsh has on his home
page...I have the URL but I'll wait for him to publish it). I scanned in
the search warrant myself and a friend of mine said he'd put the *whole*
thing on his web page...when he gets it up, I'll publish that URL here as
well (Luke...I was able to squeeze all 38 pages to just under 3MB with JPEG
and appropriate compression, leaving it at the original page size).
There's a copy of the tap/trace thing in the search warrant that points out
the exceptions to court ordered taps. *If* US WEST had reason to believe I
was accessing *their own* network for a malicious purpose, they *could* tap
my line. I have a relative who is a top exec at GTE and I mentioned this to
him and he said they would *never* do a tap without a court order (which is
another reason why I mention GTE as a nice alternative for service :-).
>It's a violation of the 5th amendment.
>
>Someone else here made a good point... Did you contact the EFF? They
>might help you with your legal expenses, or even provide you with counsel.
I just might do that.
I noticed that US WEST put the tap on my line in late May *before* they had
any reason to suspect me in other activity and *before* the FBI's
involvement (it says the FBI didn't get involved until June 1). The FBI put
a *court ordered* tap on my line on August 17th, so I can just imagine the
FBI saying "Oh dear...you shouldn't have done this without a court
order...let's get one pronto!" and there it is.
