Wiretaps Soar in ’09 — No Requests Denied

[bonnie]

Haven't looked it up recently but wasn't this something Obama was going to bring to an end.After he lambasted Bush over every action the man took

Wiretaps Soar in ’09 — No Requests Denied

The number of wiretaps authorized by federal and state judges in criminal probes rose sharply during the first year of the Obama administration, increasing 26 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a new report from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.

Federal officials requested 663 wiretap orders and states sought 1,713 orders, for a total of 2,376 criminal wiretap orders last year — with 96 percent of wiretaps targeting mobile phones in drug cases.

Not a single request for a wiretap was turned down.

On average, each wiretap intercepted the communications of 113 people, meaning that 268,488 people had phone calls or text messages monitored, a new record, according to an analysis of the report by Wired.com.

A single wiretap related to a drug investigation in Arizona intercepted 31,062 messages over 71 days.

Each wiretap costs an average of $52,200, bringing the total bill to over $124 million for the year. But while the taps led to the arrest of 4,537 people, they resulted in just 678 convictions.

“Law enforcement officials have long warned that encryption technology allows criminals to hide their activities, but investigators encountered encrypted communications only one time during 2009’s wiretaps,” Wired.com reported.

The number of wiretaps in the report does not include wiretaps ordered in terrorism probes, which go through a special court in Washington, D.C., nor does it include communications intercepted by the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.

Created in 1939, the Administrative Office of the United States Courts provides a wide range of administrative, legal, financial, management, and information technology services to the federal courts.

[karl]

January 8, 2008 HANOVER, N.H.

Barack Obama may be leading the Democratic presidential pack in every major poll here, but that didn't dissuade the Illinois senator from a final early-morning rally with the Facebook generation.

Clearly not content to leave their votes to the whims of online politicking, the Illinois senator stepped onto a stage fashioned in a Dartmouth College gymnasium, pulled an index card from his inside jacket pocket, and launched into a familiar set of talking points centered on what has become a familiar theme for his campaign: change and hope.

"My job this morning is to be so persuasive...that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will suddenly realize that you must go to the polls and vote for Barack," he told a crowd of about 300 Ivy Leaguers--and, by the looks of it, a handful of locals who managed to gain access to what was supposed to be a students-only event.

For one thing, under an Obama presidency, Americans will be able to leave behind the era of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and "wiretaps without warrants," he said. (He was referring to the lingering legal fallout over reports that the National Security Agency scooped up Americans' phone and Internet activities without court orders, ostensibly to monitor terrorist plots, in the years after the September 11 attacks.)

It's hardly a new stance for Obama, who has made similar statements in previous campaign speeches, but mention of the issue in a stump speech, alongside more frequently discussed topics like Iraq and education, may give some clue to his priorities.