US government increases wiretraps by 20 per cent
Big Brother listening in
A US court report on wiretapping shows that the phenomenon is up by 20 per cent on last year, reaching its highest ever level, with not even a single surveillance application turned down in the whole of 2007.
The report notes that last year alone, 2,208 wiretaps were authorised by the courts, most having been requested by US state authorities, with only 457 being requested by Federal Agencies. This is significantly higher than the 1839 requested in 2006.
According to the report, citizens shouldn’t have to worry about big brother listening in on their phone calls unless they are involved in drug deals or, in very rare incidents, murders and assaults. A whopping 81 per cent of portable devices (including pagers and mobile phones) monitored in 2007 were related to drugs busts, with only 6 per cent being reserved for potential murder suspects. Maybe that’s because drugs are lucrative and wiretapping is a costly business, wracking up a hefty cost of $48,477 per investigation.
Adding to the inflated number of US civilian wiretraps, the US Justice department last week also admitted that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance was on the rise, with 2370 wiretrap applications approved by the courts in 2007 alone. And those are the ones with warrants. So if you think they’re listening in on you… you’re not being paranoid, you’re probably just perceptive. µ
L’Inq
WireTrap Report
Comments
Eh?
"I can't understand a word those Brits are saying. They're speaking either, Blightyish, Cockney rhyming slang, Gaelic, Welsh, or some other such dervish. We'll need to contact their Foriegn Office for a translation. I can not reckon how they bloody understand our films and video games. Perhaps we can get one or two more of them over here, to teach us how to talk."Or you could run Vista
If your running Vista I am sure it is automatically reporting a list to the FEDs as often as it updates it's so called Defender for for malware.Why do you think it was so late to be released and such a resource hog. It has to monitor you just like the FEDs want plus all the DRM infection running in the background. Thats why they dropped the lawsuits against MS in the first place. Why do you think it has all been kept secret, why do you think MS keeps their OS's so encrypted and proprietary?
The Parrot Barks At Midnight
I have to make this quick, (wiretaped you know...), but that number should be higher...I saw a $50.00 WireTap cards at Walmart. Yes, they tried to sell me the extended wiretap-protection for an extra $20...
Freedom
We won't be free until we can all wiretap the government.re: Eh?
In response to ₭arlsbad: "I can't understand a word those Brits are saying ... I can not [sic] reckon how they bloody understand our films and video games. Perhaps we can get one or two more of them over here, to teach us how to talk."If I’m brutally honest, I have to watch The Simpsons and 30 Rock with closed-captions on to understand what they're saying sometimes, and the actors on both shows have some of the clearest accents on American television!
You guys “talk” just fine; the British teaching Americans to speak like us would be comparable to the British lecturing the French on how to prepare food. I think the mistake we all make is to assume that our languages (and, by extension, our different accents) are closer than they really are: on a recent trip to California I discovered that “Mary”, “merry”, and “marry” are all pronounced the same; in England they sound entirely different.
Baloney
BS, why don't they just ask their workers if they want to know what drug deals are going down,http://www.ecocho.co.uk/yahoo/search.php?
q=Bush+Cheney+drug+empire&page=1&type=web
Legalise them, pricks. Only reason we let you in those jobs in the first place.
The further irony: intl set up in the first place primarily to smuggle things like drugs.