{"id":12984,"date":"2012-09-27T15:07:17","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T22:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=12984"},"modified":"2012-09-27T15:07:17","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T22:07:17","slug":"justice-department-shows-huge-increase-in-warrantless-electronic-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=12984","title":{"rendered":"Justice Department Shows Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"

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New Justice Department Documents Show Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance<\/strong>
\nBy Naomi Gilens, ACLU – 27 September, 2012<\/p>\n

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans\u2019 electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.<\/p>\n

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general\u2019s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of \u201cpen register\u201d and \u201ctrap and trace\u201d surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government\u2019s surveillance power. (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)<\/p>\n

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies\u2019 call-routing hardware.<\/p>\n

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about\u2014rather than the contents of\u2014communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the \u201cto\u201d and \u201cfrom\u201d addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn’t entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).
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\nElectronic Surveillance Is Sharply on the Rise
\n<\/strong>
\nThe reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department\u2019s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011. …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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New Justice Department Documents Show Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance By Naomi Gilens, ACLU – 27 September, 2012 Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans\u2019 electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability. The documents, handed over by the more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3557],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12984"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12986,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12984\/revisions\/12986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}