| http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52781,00.html Busy Year for Big Brother By Declan McCullagh 2:00 a.m. May 25, 2002 PDT WASHINGTON -- Wiretaps leaped in number once again last year, mostly due to drug investigations, new government figures show. Federal and state police legally intercepted approximately 2.3 million conversations and pager communications in 2001, spending about $72 million in the process, the federal court system's annual report says. The true number of authorized wiretaps is likely to be far greater. This week's figures do not include all U.S. Customs surveillance -- some of their records were lost in the destruction of the World Trade Center -- or those super-secret investigations done under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Here are the raw numbers: 1,491 wiretap applications were authorized, each intercepting an average of 1,565 conversations. No judge anywhere in the United States denied a police wiretap request. State courts authorized 67 percent of wiretaps. The average length was about two months, and 68 percent of taps were on "portable" devices, such as pagers and cell phones. The total number of wiretaps jumped 25 percent from 2000. Drug-related crimes were the cause of 78 percent of them. According to the report: "Encryption was reported to have been encountered in 16 wiretaps terminated in 2001; however, in none of these cases was encryption reported to have prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted." Only court-authorized wiretaps appear in the report, not illegal ones performed in violation of state and federal law. In 1999, the Los Angeles County Public Defender's office estimated that the local police illegally under-reported actual wiretaps by a factor of ten. - - - Basic electronics: Hollywood's war against Silicon Valley is escalating. In a report (PDF) sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Motion Picture Association of America warns of the dangers of rampant piracy of digital works if they are transformed into analog form. According to the MPAA, "all devices that perform analog to digital conversions" should be regulated -- something that critics say would roil the U.S. electronics industry and eliminate its ability to compete globally. - - - E-mail risks: A mis-addressed, e-mail message on Capitol Hill has turned into a minor political flap. A Democratic aide confessed in a message that her party's complaints about Republicans' Social Security proposals were "not entirely factually accurate ... but it is sooo fun to bash Republicans. :)" Whoops! The aide, who works for Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), accidentally sent the e-mail to a Republican staffer, who then sent it through the GOP ranks. The Washington Times reported this week that Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, made the accidental message public. - - - Critical right: Bill Sheehan has filed suit in federal court against a state law designed to outlaw his justicefiles.org site. Justicefiles.org compiles and republishes publicly available information on law enforcement officers in Washington state. While a presumptively legal act, it was still offensive enough to local politicos that it led to a suit against Sheehan and to a state law making his site verboten. Now Sheehan is suing to overturn that law, which takes effect on June 13, saying it violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. "The (law) suppresses truthful information of interest to the public," the complaint says. "The First Amendment prohibits any attempt to punish the publication of lawfully obtained, truthful information about a matter of public interest absent a need to further a state interest of the highest order." - - - Jim Bell update: Way back in the 1980s, entrepreneur Jim Bell owned a company that sold computer storage devices. Now Bell works in a California prison, demolishing computers and their monitors at the handsome wage of 46 cents an hour. "I've taken a day job destroying computer monitors," Bell said in a phone call from prison this week. "I've gone through about 100 so far." Bell is the infamous author of Assassination Politics, an essay that discusses ways to eliminate bothersome IRS agents. That captured the attention of the feds, who charged him with stalking federal agents. Last year, a jury found Bell guilty and he's been sentenced (PDF) to 10 years. Bell says that it's easy to destroy a monitor without making it implode. "That almost never is impressive, particularly if you do it right," he says. "There's a little nib at the end of the CRT that if you hit it just right with the hammer it creates a small hiss. There's an ooomph if someone drops the monitor, but other than that it's pretty innocuous." He gets paid by Unicorp, the Justice Department-affiliated business that markets prison labor to federal agencies. Eventually, Bell says, he'll be making $1.07 an hour. "Some day." - - - Pet privacy: First it was the National Zoo in Washington insisting, in the face of logic and law, that zoo animals have "privacy" rights. Now it's Dog Fancy magazine running an article teased with: "Are your dog's medical records private?" It turns out the article isn't just frantic worrying about whether Fido's natural rights were violated by a dog collar -- or whether he might be a victim of receiving cheesy marketing literature. The article, written by a Kansas City attorney, says that in 1999, the American Veterinary Medical Association revised its ethical principles to say that vet records should be private and confidential. But few states have laws protecting veterinarian-client privilege. Wouldn't it be easier to just ask your vet to promise to do the right thing -- and get it in writing? |
