Judge estimates 30K secret spying orders approved yearly
Creepy. The camera in the nose costs $2.3 million and has infrared and ultraviolet capabilities that allow it to see into structures as well as tell if you have narcotics in your pocket from nine miles away. Coming to a city near you....
Federal judges approve about 30,000 secret warrants to spy on people in the USA every year, and the innocent probably will never know they were watched, says a U.S. jurist involved in issuing the orders. Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith writes in a new paper, highlighted by Ars Technica, that the 2006 total outstripped the entire output of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courtsince it was created in 1979, and the number is probably growing. The secret orders are authorized by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, known as ECPA. Smith writes that the volume of such cases "is greater than the combined yearly total of all antitrust, employment discrimination, environmental, copyright, patent, trademark and securities cases filed in federal court." The warrants and the court's proceedings are not open to public scrutiny. A three-judge panel reviews denials of applications for the warrants, but the court is not adversarial or open, and many orders are never unsealed.