RE: Clinton signs bill to count wiretaps that encounter encryption
Arnold wrote: It will be interesting to see what the reports say. But it is worth noting that according to http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap99/contents.html there were 1350 wiretaps approved by state and federal judges in the US in 1999. 72% were for drug cases. Over the last 10 years, wiretaps have accounted for an average of less than 2500 convictions per year. Hence wiretaps convict only a tiny fraction of the US prison population, which is now over 1.3 million. While it is a popular myth that the USG counts wiretaps, the USG does not in fact do so. The USG counts wiretap orders. There is a significant difference between the number of wiretap orders issued and the number of wiretaps performed. I am not even talking about the wiretaps that are being performed without court order typically showing up at trials as a "confidential informant" source. Wiretap orders can, and virtually almost always do, cover multiple phone lines. At a minimum, a wiretap order will cover a person's home and work numbers. Even if you work at a small office, that's likely to be several lines at least. But wiretap orders can and do go beyond that. The glimpse at wiretap reality the cases in LA have afforded the public show that judges will issue wiretap orders for entire cellular providers. One wiretap order listed in the official statistics may well correspond to several hundred, or even thousands, of wiretaps. Statistics are good thing, but they need to be read carefully. --Lucky
RE: Clinton signs bill to count wiretaps that encounter encryption
At 1:05 AM -0700 5/8/2000, Lucky Green wrote: Arnold wrote: It will be interesting to see what the reports say. But it is worth noting that according to http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap99/contents.html there were 1350 wiretaps approved by state and federal judges in the US in 1999. 72% were for drug cases. Over the last 10 years, wiretaps have accounted for an average of less than 2500 convictions per year. Hence wiretaps convict only a tiny fraction of the US prison population, which is now over 1.3 million. While it is a popular myth that the USG counts wiretaps, the USG does not in fact do so. The USG counts wiretap orders. There is a significant difference between the number of wiretap orders issued and the number of wiretaps performed. I am not even talking about the wiretaps that are being performed without court order typically showing up at trials as a "confidential informant" source. Wiretap orders can, and virtually almost always do, cover multiple phone lines. At a minimum, a wiretap order will cover a person's home and work numbers. Even if you work at a small office, that's likely to be several lines at least. But wiretap orders can and do go beyond that. The glimpse at wiretap reality the cases in LA have afforded the public show that judges will issue wiretap orders for entire cellular providers. One wiretap order listed in the official statistics may well correspond to several hundred, or even thousands, of wiretaps. Statistics are good thing, but they need to be read carefully. --Lucky You are correct that a single wiretap order can cover several lines. However the DOJ report has a lot of information on this. See. for example, http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap99/table499.pdf The average wiretap installed intercepted 1921 communications, of which 390 were considered incriminating. The average wiretap was installed for 50 days, so that works out to 38 interceptions per day per tap installed. There are numbers given for single vs multiple locations which suggest that single location taps predominate, but a large "other" block makes that question hard to answer for sure. More to my point, which is that authorized wiretaps catch only a small fraction of criminals, are the arrest and conviction numbers. http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap99/table999.pdf These are a little tricky to interpret because of time lags, but seem to run around 2500 convictions per year. Even if the average criminal convicted on wiretap evidence spends 20 years in prison, that only accounts for 50,000 prisoners, a drop in the bucket given a U.S. prison population of 1.3 million. Arnold Reinhold
Re: Clinton signs bill to count wiretaps that encounter encryption
On Fri, 5 May 2000 08:58:45 -0400 "Arnold G. Reinhold" [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It's worse than that. The new reports are to cover "law enforcement encounters with encrypted communications in the execution of wiretap orders." http://www.politechbot.com/docs/clinton-crypto.050300.html "Encounters" suggests that there will be no distinction between encryption that hinders law enforcement access and encryption that does not. For example, any tap of a GSM cell phone could be reported even though the cipher GSM uses is relatively easy to break. In 1999 there were 676 authorized taps for cell phones and pagers vs. 399 for stationary phones. (1998: 576 vs 494, so the trend is toward cell phones) Any tap on the GSM cell phone will _not_ be on the encrypted over-the-air interface but simply on the plaintext leaving the base station on the fixed network. According to the White House press release the test was "encountered encryption" and they could well have counted GSM even if they could get around the encryption as you describe. Declan points out that the law was worded more carefully than the press release, so things are not as bad as I feared. Point for Congress. It will be interesting to see what the reports say. But it is worth noting that according to http://www.uscourts.gov/wiretap99/contents.html there were 1350 wiretaps approved by state and federal judges in the US in 1999. 72% were for drug cases. Over the last 10 years, wiretaps have accounted for an average of less than 2500 convictions per year. Hence wiretaps convict only a tiny fraction of the US prison population, which is now over 1.3 million. Furthermore, law enforcement has many ways to deal with encryption: traffic analysis, bugs, viruses, informers,... If it gets the bad guys to talk more, encryption could be a boon for LE. Arnold Reinhold
Re: Clinton signs bill to count wiretaps that encounter encryption
Er, and how will these numbers be audited? Given that distorting them will do no direct and immediate harm to any individual, the temptation to "adjust" the numbers will be great. Of course nobody in law enforcement would ever do such a thing ... Barney Wolff [EMAIL PROTECTED]
