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04/29/2003 Archived Entry: "Report: Most Forms of Wiretapping Dropped in 2002"

IT'S KIND OF GOOD NEWS: A report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts states that law enforcement in the U.S. sought fewer court orders in 2002 for wire taps.

Federal and state judges authorized all but one of the 1,359 wiretap applications submitted in 2002. The requests represented a 9 percent decrease from the 1,491 applications logged the previous year, according to the annual report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

Federal wiretaps rose by 2 percent, to 497, while the number of applications filed by state officials dropped 14 percent to 861.

Fears that the Bush/Ashcroft White House would unleash a wave of Big Brother surveillance Americans have turned out to be groundless but the money stat is in the first sentence of that quote. "Federal and state judges authorized all but one of the 1,359 wiretap applications submitted in 2002."

It used to be that law enforcement would have to jump through hoops to get a wiretap approved...a 99.9 per cent approval rate doesn't mean that officers are being real careful about who they want to wiretap and how completely they fill out the forms, it means judges are generally just waving through the applications without thinking twice in most situations.

Of course, you could say that 1 359 wiretaps isn't exactly a mass campaign of spying on American citizens...well, if you forget about Echelon anyway. And we have yet to learn how many were approved in the so-called "spy court."