9 October 1998
Thanks to EJ
To: jy@jya.com Subject: Wiretapping in LA Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1998 16:54:29 -0500 http://www.abcnews.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/privacyla981007.html By John Miller ABCNEWS.com There are 6.5 million telephones in Los Angeles. For years in California it was illegal, even for the police, to listen in. Then in 1989, California passed a law targeting drug dealers that allows police to use wiretaps when all other investigative techniques have failed. Since then, law enforcement officials in the City of Angels have followed what Deputy Public Defender Kathy Quant calls a policy to "wiretap a lot, and to wiretap everybody." Quant charges that police in Los Angeles are using wiretaps as a first step, not a last resort as required by law-and that many thousands of people are being overheard improperly. Listening to Pay Phones The district attorney's office in Los Angeles claims otherwise. "Every wire, everything we've sought, has all been judicially authorized," says Bill Hodgeman. The district attorney's office says that since 1993, they have only applied for 90 wiretap orders. But the number of wiretap orders does not reflect the actual number of people being overheard. One particular wiretap order allowed police to listen in on 350 different telephones for what turned out to be an unusually extended period. As Quant says, "the average wiretap lasts 30 days. [But] not in Los Angeles. It lasted almost two years." Prosecutors say that some of the taps lead them to drugs and drug money, but most of the taps seem to lead nowhere while grossly violating privacy. In one case, five public pay phones were tapped. Police listened to 131,000 conversations without making a single arrest. A Critical Oversight California law requires that when a wiretap is concluded, the authorities have to notify everyone who was overheard-especially people who were not suspects. Now the district attorney's office admits that, in most cases, they never told anyone. "It was indeed an oversight," Hodgeman says. "There's no question about it." This oversight could bring privacy lawsuits and cause convictions to be overturned. While prosecutors and defense lawyers grapple over the legality of thousands of intercepted conversations, no branch of government seems too eager to take the lead in getting to the bottom of all this-not the attorney general, not the judges, not the legislature. Right now, Los Angeles' Big Brother story seems to be a political hot potato. ----------------------- "Any time that you're developing a new product, you will be working closely with the NSA," Ira Rubenstein, Microsoft attorney and a top lieutenant to Bill Gates ----------------------