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Newyork more wiretaps than anywhere else Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/189462p-163870c.htmlhttp://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/189462p-163870c.html
City goes bug happy
More legal wiretaps than anywhere else
By GREG B. SMITH
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Welcome to Bug City.
New York City's cell phones, pagers, landlines and even computers were wiretapped by investigators more than in any other city in the country last year, new statistics show.
And it's not the FBI doing most of the listening.
Local law enforcement agencies are leading the pack when it comes to getting a judge's okay to tap into New York's private chatter.
Last year, judges approved 246 wiretap orders - covering thousands of people - for New York City law enforcement, compared with 118 in Los Angeles, seven in Miami, five in Chicago and 117 in the entire state of New Jersey.
Almost all the locally sought wiretaps were part of drug probes.
"Without the wiretap, we would not be able to apprehend those at the upper levels of narcotics trafficking organizations," said Bridget Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor, whose power allows her to probe across borough lines.
Queens was the most-bugged borough, with 5,808 people tapped by District Attorney Richard Brown in 2003.
Brown called wiretaps a "critical weapon in the war on crime" that "allows us to infiltrate sophisticated criminal organizations whose members might otherwise escape prosecution."
Staten Island was bug-free, with former District Attorney William Murphy using not a single wiretap in 2003.
That's according to statistics released Friday by the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, which tracks eavesdropping by federal, state and local law enforcement.
Local detectives have plenty of company.
Statewide, New York leads the nation in authorized wiretaps, with 328 orders approved for state and local investigators last year, including the 246 in New York City.
That was far more than in California (188), New Jersey (117) or anywhere else.
In fact, 22 states, from Maine to Hawaii, reported no wiretaps at all in 2003, statistics showed.
Nationally, the use of wiretaps increased 6% last year, with 1,442 secret interceptions given the thumbs-up by judges for all law enforcement agencies.
The jump was due mostly to a rise in eavesdropping by federal prosecutors going after narcotics, money laundering and organized crime.
Federal investigators got approval for 90 wiretap orders in New York City, Long Island and northern suburbs in 2003.
The numbers do not include 1,700 ultra-secret terrorist wiretaps obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, officials said.
Eavesdropping isn't cheap.
The Queens district attorney spent $1.2 million on wiretaps, just a bit more than the $1.1 million spent by the special narcotics prosecutor.
But nobody across the nation spent as much as the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, which investigates Mafia and drug cases statewide.
Last year, the task force spent $7.4 million to tap the chatter of 21,852 people, more than the No. 2 spender, Los Angeles, which spent $4.8 million to bug 16,536 people, records show.
Originally published on May 2, 2004
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