A new federal report shows that the number of surveillance requests skyrocketed in 2015, and that courts approved every single one of them. That’s right, not one single wiretap request was rejected during 2015.
The U.S. government’s annual wiretap report details how many real-time intercept requests were submitted by state and federal law enforcement agencies. The most recent edition of this report, released today, says America’s courts allowed 4,148 wiretaps during the last calendar year, up by 17 percent from the previous year.
Most of the wiretap requests in the most recent report period were issued by state courts, and California approved the most of all states — a whopping 41% of all applications.
Zack Whittaker at ZDNet writes:
The report doesn’t take into account classified national security requests, which typically involve terrorism, submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which were already reported earlier this year.
The government received 1,457 requests from the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to intercept phone calls and emails last year, but too did not reject a single order.
Wiretap Report 2015 [Source: www.uscourts.gov]