FC: Wiretaps on the rise in 2001; Jim-Bell-in-prison update

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,52781,00.html

   Busy Year for Big Brother
   By Declan McCullagh

   2:00 a.m. May 25, 2002 PDT
   WASHINGTON -- Wiretaps leaped in number once again last year, mostly
   due to drug investigations, new government figures show.

   Federal and state police legally intercepted approximately 2.3 million
   conversations and pager communications in 2001, spending about $72
   million in the process, the federal court system's annual report says.

   The true number of authorized wiretaps is likely to be far greater.
   This week's figures do not include all U.S. Customs surveillance --
   some of their records were lost in the destruction of the World Trade
   Center -- or those super-secret investigations done under the Foreign
   Intelligence Surveillance Act.

   Here are the raw numbers: 1,491 wiretap applications were authorized,
   each intercepting an average of 1,565 conversations. No judge anywhere
   in the United States denied a police wiretap request. State courts
   authorized 67 percent of wiretaps. The average length was about two
   months, and 68 percent of taps were on "portable" devices, such as
   pagers and cell phones.

   The total number of wiretaps jumped 25 percent from 2000. Drug-related
   crimes were the cause of 78 percent of them.

   According to the report: "Encryption was reported to have been
   encountered in 16 wiretaps terminated in 2001; however, in none of
   these cases was encryption reported to have prevented law enforcement
   officials from obtaining the plain text of communications
   intercepted."

   Only court-authorized wiretaps appear in the report, not illegal ones
   performed in violation of state and federal law. In 1999, the Los
   Angeles County Public Defender's office estimated that the local
   police illegally under-reported actual wiretaps by a factor of ten.

   [...]

   Jim Bell update: Way back in the 1980s, entrepreneur Jim Bell owned a
   company that sold computer storage devices.

   Now Bell works in a California prison, demolishing computers and their
   monitors at the handsome wage of 46 cents an hour. "I've taken a day
   job destroying computer monitors," Bell said in a phone call from
   prison this week. "I've gone through about 100 so far."

   Bell is the infamous author of Assassination Politics, an essay that
   discusses ways to eliminate bothersome IRS agents. That captured the
   attention of the feds, who charged him with stalking federal agents.
   Last year, a jury found Bell guilty and he's been sentenced (PDF) to
   10 years.

   Bell says that it's easy to destroy a monitor without making it
   implode. "That almost never is impressive, particularly if you do it
   right," he says. "There's a little nib at the end of the CRT that if
   you hit it just right with the hammer it creates a small hiss. There's
   an ooomph if someone drops the monitor, but other than that it's
   pretty innocuous."

   He gets paid by Unicorp, the Justice Department-affiliated business
   that markets prison labor to federal agencies. Eventually, Bell says,
   he'll be making $1.07 an hour. "Some day."




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