With a single warrant issued in 2016 as part of a drug investigation, unnamed US federal authorities monitored and recorded millions of phone calls.
The wiretapping order authorized an unidentified U.S. government agency to conduct real-time recordings of 3.29 million cellphone conversations over a two-month period during 2016, after a request was filed in late 2015.
The warrant was signed to help authorities track 26 people suspected of illegal drug activities in Pennsylvania.
The final amount spent on the wiretaps reached $335,000 and led to twelve arrests.
However, none of those arrested were convicted. The revelation was buried in the annual report of the US courts, published earlier this week.
“The federal wiretapping occurred during a drug investigation in the Middle District of Pennsylvania and resulted in the monitoring of 3,292,385 phone conversations or messages over a 60-day period,” the report states.
The details of the case remain unknown.
However, the above news makes it clear that telephone wiretapping continues to exist and is carried out with great ease on a mass scale, using only a warrant.
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Albert Gidari, a former privacy lawyer who currently serves as director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, criticized the research.
“They spent a fortune to monitor 26 people, recorded three million conversations and obviously nothing came of it,” Gidari said.
“I would love to see the potential affidavit on this and wonder what the court thought.”
“I am not surprised by the results because, on average, a very low percentage of conversations incriminate and a very small percentage lead to a conviction,” he added.
