Analysis: Busy Year for Big Brother

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.