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
