Wiretapping and Cryptography Today

Report from the sky didn't fall department.

The 2010 U.S. Wiretap Report was released a couple
of weeks ago, the latest in a series of puzzles published annually, on
and off, by congressional mandate since the Nixon administration.
The report, as
its name implies, summarizes legal wiretapping by federal and state law enforcement agencies. The reports are puzzles because they are notoriously
incomplete; the data relies on spotty reporting, and information
on "national security" (FISA) taps is excluded altogether. Still, it's
the most complete public picture of wiretapping as practiced in the US that we
have, and as such, is of likely interest to many readers here.

We now know that there were at least 3194 criminal wiretaps
last year (1207 of these were by federal law enforcement and 1987 were
done by state and local agencies). The previous year there were only
2376 reported, but it isn't clear how much of this increase was due to
improved data collection in 2010. Again, this is only "Title III" content
wiretaps for criminal investigations (mostly drug cases); it doesn't include
"pen registers" that record call details without audio or taps for
counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations, which presumably
have accounted for an increasing proportion of intercepts since 2001.
And there's apparently still a fair
bit of underreporting in the statistics. So we don't really know how much wiretapping the government actually does in total or what the trends
really look like. There's a lot of noise among the signals here.

But for all the noise, one interesting fact stands out rather clearly.
Despite dire predictions to the contrary,
the open availability of cryptography has done little
to hinder law enforcement's ability to conduct investigations.
See the rest of this (rather long) entry...