
Electronic surveillance up 5x in DC area since 2011, almost all sealed cases - Jerry2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/us-courts-electronic-surveillance-up-500-percent-in-dc-area-since-2011-almost-all-sealed-cases/2016/10/22/48693ffa-8f10-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html
======
zaroth
Uncovering secret surveillance enabled by the courts? Easy to read graphs that
have a y-axis starting at zero? Paywall free, informative content? I clicked a
few ads to say thanks.

When only 1 of 4,100 cases over five years in a particular district has the
_public record_ unsealed, I think it's safe to call this a cover-up.

> Yet the listings of how often law enforcement applied to judges to conduct
> covert electronic surveillance — a list that itself is usually sealed... The
> information about what are known as pen register and trap and trace orders
> was made public after litigation by the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier
> Foundation (EFF), journalists and others, including some service providers.

You know, when the press operates as it should, as nonpartisan fact finder and
uncovering truth through hard-fought FOIA battles, well first your sick about
whatever you just read, then at least you feel a bit better knowing that at
least someone is trying to shine some light on it.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Its not paywall free. You are limited to a set of free articles every month.

------
wyldfire
Seems odd that they didn't define the term "pen register" beyond the
"(outbound messages)" in the graphic. From Wikipedia: "A pen register, or
dialed number recorder (DNR), is an electronic device that records all numbers
called from a particular telephone line."

> ... warrant appeared to authorize the FBI to secretly place code, or
> malware, on all computers that logged in to an anonymous email service...

I keep thinking of the parallels between the actions of spearphishing
criminals and these law enforcement agencies.

------
QUFB
Every time I see Northern Virginia and these volumes of requests from the
government, I think Amazon and us-east-1.

------
dailyrorschach
One thing worth noting here, is that it's unclear if this means electronic
surveillance is up 5x in the DC area (as the area of investigation). As the
article notes, these courts routinely handle requests for nationwide
investigations. It would be interesting to repeat this process with other
federal districts, especially in major cities.

